How to Be A Vtuber in 2026
I've been saying this forever that I think we need more Vtubers and why would you not want to be one in today's era? It's anonymous so it's safe, you're free to be yourself, do whatever you want, you're in complete control of everything your audience will see visually, and having that control is a good way to avoid the classic, "Lets scan the background" type of audience member.
But what a lot of people fail to realize is that being a vtuber is 100% free. You don't need all the bells and whistles, all the toggles, and animations to get started. Every single thing I do in my videos and livestreams is 100% free.
In this very short course, I'm gonna run you through how you can be a Vtuber from creating the Avatar, to bringing it to life, to setting up OBS, and hitting record. All free.
- We will be using a software called Vroid
- We will be using V Magic Mirror to capture your motion
- We will use OBS or Streamlabs to go live
- That's it. Easy.
USING VROID STUDIOS
The First thing you're going to want to do is download the latest version of Vroid Studio for your PC. Vroid is great because it has a very low, virtually non-existent, skill ceiling. It comes packed with presets that you can mix and match, outfits that you can try, hair styles, eye shapes, tons of sliders and you can play around with different settings but you don't need to be a master artist to get a working avatar. Use one of the presets for now until you're comfortable enough to play with the settings. My avatar has gone through 8 redesigns. Your first one is your worst one.
1. Open the software and select New (ignore the pre-built Avatars)
2. Choose whether you're avatar will be Male or Female. (If you're a Male, pick a male avatar. Don't be one of those dudes)
3. You'll land on the face presets. Scroll with the mouse wheel to zoom in, click the mouse wheel and drag, and you'll be able to focus in on the face while you play around with the settings
Play around with it
4. Go to the hairstyle tab and play with the hairstyle presets.
5. Zoom out, scroll up, Go to the outfits tab and select your outfit
6. You can go to the Body tab to change the body shape to fit your desire proportions. The default settings for both male and female are pretty solid for a beginner so i would just go with that. If you do want to change things, the parameters on the right will control that. You can adjust height, width, heads, head, feet, and breast size
7. The accessories tab will give your avatar glasses or animal ears. You can adjust that to your liking. Just click add an accessory, They've just added tails
8. After you've played around with the settings and you've gotten your avatar perfect, click the camera icon in the top right and lets snap some pictures of your avatar, you're gonna need a profile picture, so best to pick a pic size of about 1000x1000 or something square and then line your avatar right
9. After you've taken a cute picture, for your profile, hit the export button next to the camera Icon and export your avatar to a safe location. The VRM file that it spits out will be considered "your body" in the virtual world. That VRM is what V Magic mirror will read and scan.
Hit Export, you will need to fill out the Creator (You) and the Name of the Avatar
WHERE TO GET HAIR AND CLOTHES
You'll want to go to Booth.pm
Go to the top left and search for Vroid Textures and then scroll down and sort by free. This will give you all the Free items created by Indie artists.
Now, this will take a little bit of time but you'll enjoy going through the free outfits and hair styles and watching your avatar come to life before your eyes.
After you've got hair and an outfit for your avatar, search for ArgamaWitch and go to her store, scroll past all her paid stuff. You're looking for the desk and chair.
She gives away Vtuber props for free. You can build your entire background from just her store and its super easy to layer it up in OBS or streamlabs
V MAGIC MIRROR
Now that you're familiar with Booth, Go here and download VMagicMirror, The free version is all you need.
They do have a paid version for 3000 yen, which is about 25 US dollars. and it comes with more features but you don't actually need it. The free version is more than capable of doing everything.
Once you've downloaded and installed it, open it up.
On Start up, you'll be greeted with a little window, Press Load VRM from PC and find your avatar that you just exported
Go over to the "Streaming" Tab and it'll have everything you need to adjust your avatar to the exact position you want it to be in.
Click "Transparent Window" To bring up the green screen and you can start making adjustment. (You can also click the - button on the avatar window to move him out of the way since he will always be on top of the screen)
Find the Camera Section and Click "Free Layout" and you can click the avatar screen the move and rotate the avatar using the mouse buttons and wheel. You can drag, rotate, zoom in and out and get it in the perfect position
You can use the view tab to turn on and off different things like the keyboard and mousepad or the gamepad controller. You can use them if you want but I personally don't like how they look no matter where I position it so i just leave it off and keep my hands to my side, I use various props to imitate hands.
Change body motion to standing only for this effect.
Return to the Home tab and click settings to get a more detailed settings window
here you can connect your webcam for face tracking and connect your microphone so the software can sync the lips.
Adjust the waist width here if the arms are lookin a little weird.
That's really all you need for VMM, don't worry about the more advanced stuff. You don't really need it.
OBS
Download and install the latest version of OBS, This is what's going to broadcast you to your streaming platform. There are plenty of tutorials on OBS so I'm not gonna run through all the settings. Layer up your room, If you used ArgamaWitch's chair and desk, create an new image source and layer them so it makes sense to your scene.
Your avatar however will need to be a Game Capture Source because it uses Unity. So create a new game capture source and rename it to whatever you want.
And then set the window to VMagicMirror and make sure "Allow Transparency" is ticked otherwise the green screen will never go away.
And that's it, Set up OBS using any of the MANY tutorials that exist, set up broadcast and congratulations, You're now a Vtuber, you have an attractive model, a nice set up and you're a Vtuber for 100% free of charge.
Bonus Pro Tip
Do not watch yourself stream (other than checking your mic volume and making sure everything is good with the playback) and do not pay attention to the viewers/numbers right now. Pretend like you're streaming to 1000 people every time you go live and act as such.
The truth is: You will be streaming to 0 people for a long time. That's normal for every single person. Don't let that stop you. Learn, improve and pretend like you're streaming to a large audience and eventually that audience will show up.