When I first created this story, I had in mind to voice Lily also as a vtuber character, and made some steps towards making that happen.  It didn’t, for two reasons.  Reason 1:  I couldn’t find a voice changer that worked well enough to disguise the fact that the voice was, well, mine (that actually changed towards the end of the run).  Reason 2:  It was just plain awkward.

But as a part of that I created 3d .vrm models for all (or most at least) of the main characters.  The first model I created was this:

This model was okay for a first step, but to be honest, I didn’t really know how to use the vr generation program, which was vroid (and to be fair, the version of vroid I used was far less featureful than the versions that came out later).  I used 3tene to animate her, and found the dress on booth.pm.  The reason I brought up that the version of vroid was less featureful was that the program was designed to create, well, cute anime girls. I couldn’t do too much with her, and it kind of defaulted to a lot, well, sexier than I would have liked.

You might notice her boobs are a bit large.  This was a mistake.  I’ll explain more about that in a bit.

Her second iteration looked like this:

This iteration was better in some ways and worse in others.  The feedback I got on this model was that she looked too grown up and sexy.  I didn’t do that on purpose, but I agree in hindsight.  Her breasts were too large again (and I will again talk about that in a bit), her stockings were actually a bit out of character, etc.  I did like her dress, but all told, this was a mistake.

After I got some feedback that “a man must have written this”, well, I took that a bit personally, and I modified her body model a little.

Many of the changes were “underneath”, so to speak.  I believe I changed her body skin (which no one but me will ever see), I reduced her breast size, I think I adjusted her hips, and made her face look a little more youthful.  I don’t think I did a perfect job, but it reflected her character a little better.

Truth be told, I don’t like how I made the breasts too large in the beginning.  It was a mistake, and one that I will forever regret.  It’s not because I don’t like big breasts, or because I like small breasts, it’s because Lily is supposed to be a teenage girl, and I let some ideas about how a woman’s body looks override who Lily actually is.  That was a huge, huge mistake, and I wish I could take it back.   But all I could do was fix the body model and move on.

The last iteration of her body model is this:

This is my favorite body model by far.  What I like about it is, it’s cute.  I deliberately toned down some of the more blatant female aspects (her breasts are normal sized, her hips are normal sized, I adjusted her face to be more in line with how I imagined it, and even her pose is a lot more innocent than the previous models.  This is much more the Lily that I’d imagined than the previous models.  It helped that I had a lot more knobs to turn with the newest version of vroid, and another tool was also available to pose her far better than 3tene (or vroid) allowed.  That tool also allowed me to pose all of the other girls at the same time, too.  Previously I had to use blender, and that’s just a royal pain.

There’s a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes for a project like that.

While I’m at it, let me also discuss some of the other body models.

This is Liz.  Her body model was particularly difficult, because she was deliberately described as a smaller girl who was not as, well, developed as Lily.  Her hips are smaller, and so are her breasts.  The later models of vroid made that a lot easier.  She’s also described as pretty studious and dressing very nicely.  I don’t really think the shoes fit her, but otherwise, I like how this model turned out.  This was her first model:

Which actually wasn’t too bad, but wasn’t great either.  This was one of the renders I did in blender.  The only one, actually.

Now for Beth:

Beth was difficult because Lily played her up a little too much, and it was hard to pick an outfit/skin tone/etc for her that would do her justice.  This turned out alright but I’m also a little unhappy with how she turned out.  Maybe I’ll redo her model at some point.

One of the limiting factors of all of this is what’s available on booth.pm.  Because of the nature of vtubing, etc., the outfits that are available are about 90% sexy/fetish/whatever, and I had to pick really, really carefully.  Particularly because I didn’t want to pick any that had a license that required attribution.  It limited what I could do, but I guess it worked out… Mostly.

The ahoge is cute though.  (See below for a more recent model)

Okay, here’s Diana.

In some ways Diana was the easiest.  Her attitude is more in her pose than anything, so I just picked something that looked a little appropriate and it worked out.  I actually wanted to make her a little pudgier, but this is where I came across the limitations of vroid.  It wasn’t an option.

And…  Crystal.

I envisioned Crystal as dressing in kind of a gothic lolita kind of style, and it mostly worked.  This was another instance where I ran up against the limitations of booth.pm.  Without designing my own clothing (and who has time for that?) I pretty much had to make do.  This was alright.  It could have been better.

I did a body model of cat-girl (Anathema):

This one I actually didn’t like.  At all.  I mean, her body is fine, but it was difficult getting her face and hair, etc., right.  I may redo it, but I may… not.

Here are a couple of other pictures of Lily I experimented with.  They have their plusses and minuses.

That last one…  It was supposed to be fanservice.  It ended up just being awkward.  But, well, I guess you can see.

This was also supposed to be fanservice.  I was playing around with the body model.. and dressed her in a bikini and put her on Patreon, back when I was using it.  I don’t really see the point of that.  It’s a cute picture, and I love the expression on her face.  But if I were to do it again, I’d pick the background more carefully (It was supposed to be in Orlando, and, well.. .there’s no place in Orlando that looks like that).  I’d also choose a slightly different body skin.  This one worked, but not well with the bikini.

I do like the pose, but mostly just because it’s pretty perfectly done.  It really does look like she’s jumping.  Now if I could just add a shadow…

Where vroid completely fell over was…. Sabby.

The reason it fell over wasn’t so much because of the skin color or the face or anything like that – it’s because vroid is designed for cute, sexily dressed anime girls.  It’s not designed for middle-aged, short, slightly pudgy motherly figures with big breasts.  I could not make her pudgy – it wasn’t an option.  All I could do was dress her as frumpily as I could and pose her in such a way as to make up for vroid’s shortcomings.  This is where what I was trying to do with vroid fell flat, and about where I started giving up on the whole body model thing.  And don’t even get me started on Dave!

And vroid also kinda fell over here, bad.

This is Allison.  She is based on a girl who I am familiar with (I have never met her in person but know her mother) from real life.  She was eight or so when this picture was made.  The problem is that vroid is, AGAIN, designed for cute/sexy anime girls.  Trying to make an eight year old was mostly impossible.  This was another situation where I just had to turn some dials all the way down (you know, chest size, etc) and then add baggy clothing to hide the rest.  Because of that I was VERY DISPLEASED with how this turned out, but I literally couldn’t have done much more without actually editing the photo manually.

It was close enough, and her mother was fine with how it turned out, but I never tried to do that again.  Maybe vroid has improved in that regard.  I’ll have to poke at it when I get some spare time.

This led to a rather unfortunate situation where Liz and Allison had nearly the same size for some particular measurements, and that is not a situation I was pleased with.

She’s twelve now.  It might be slightly more doable if I tried again.  I won’t.

Let’s see, what else do I have.

This is a picture I created of Lily wearing kimono in Japan.  It turned out okay, but I don’t like it.  Maybe I should try again with her new body model.

And this is Beth’s latest body model.  I actually like this one better, for the same reason I like Lily’s better.  I ran into similar booth.pm issues, her dress is a little sexier than I would like, but it turned out alright.  I don’t like how her lip color interacts with her skin tone, but oh well.  It’s a little thing.  I’m not a huge fan of how slender vroid makes the legs and doesn’t really give much of a slider to fix that, but I guess it’s cute enough.

Hmm.  I have a couple of others.  I have one of cat-girl that, well…  you’re not going to see.  I made that one for “fanservice”, but I was never happy with the fact that I even made it, so it will stay hidden for now.

This one was cute.  I actually like it.  I did a good job with the posing, I like her dress, all that.  But it just never actually fit with the story and I will probably remove it when I figure out which post I attached it to.

I think I have one of Lily in a maid outfit somewhere.  I never uploaded it to this page, it was used just for a youtube.  Maybe I will.

Anyway, that’s some behind-the-scenes stuff about the characters’ body models, etc.  It’s more difficult than it appears, isn’t it?  I mean, it’d be really easy to make some or all of the characters (except Allison for at least TWO reasons, and only one is age, the other is the inadequacy of the body model) in all sorts of different outfits and stuff, but at the end of the day, it just doesn’t serve the story, and keeping the models appealing while also staying true to their character is not easy.  I missed the mark more than once.  But I hope the current models are pretty close.