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• How I Color Things
• How I Structure Things
• How to use CSP

• I'm not ready for this knowledge take me back

So, ya wanna suffer huh.Hopefully this will give you the tools to make your own shit without delving into 5000 hours of tutorials & 5000 headaches scrolling through ridiculous documentation.HERES WHAT YOU WILL LEARN BY FOLLOWING THIS GUIDE:
the tale of a mans descent into misery and despair and how i can hopefully keep you off that path.HERES WHAT YOU WILL NOT LEARN BY FOLLOWING THIS GUIDE:
how to actually use live2d properly.
how to split up your image for this program (ill add this later)
(look im gonna try my best)alright lets get into it.

welcome to your nightmare for the next 10+ hours of your life, this is what you're greeted with upon opening up Live2d.

Theres a few icons you're gonna see when you first open up this hellscape.from left to right they are:

dont worry about like any of this for now, just figured id introduce them and name them so you can like them more.

alright let me get my 10,000$ custom commisioned art piece out for this

this dudes name is Box because his head is shaped like a box. he cost me my entire life savings, i cherish him.Box is going to help out today by becoming alive, and then mimicking your movements to mock you.also unless you are a mantis shrimp you couldnt possibly comprehend the bountiful colors Box is displaying to us. skill difference honestly.Later on Box might need to tone down his colors so mortals can see it, otherwise he can't talk, but he'll decide that later.

BEFORE YOU DRAW ANYTHING

As a general rule of thumb, you want literally everything on its own layer, it fucking sucks and its a miserable pain.Another tidbit that i overlooked, even if something is obscured pretty substantially, like most of the head is covered by hair, or something along those lines, draw the entire thing anyways to completion. Give your character some giraffe neck. You will thank yourself later.Once you've drawn everything, you must merge each piece of something into one layer containing that thing condensed. If you have a piece of hair, condense its lineart, base color, shading, shines, multiply, whatever. It all needs to be one piece of hair.
Merge all the appropriate layers.Name the layers correctly, losers online will say that you should mirror the names, honestly, that shits stupid and confusing and i dont care if its the proper way to do it its stupid.
Name shit whatever you will recognize. If you name the left eye Barbara and you know Barbara is the left eye then whatever. Just make it clear that each thing is the thing that you think the thing is. Dont confuse yourself.Save as PSD. DO NOT USE PROCREATE
(it fucks up the texture atlas and its just worse quality and i never wanna see you do it.)

Heres how I organized Boxs' layers. Super duper simplified.

This is the less complicated layers for cobalts rig. Theres a few more layers off screen that didnt fit but you get the gist.

Ok so you now have your character, great, im proud.Pop that shit into Live2d.

Isn't he just adorable... too bad he hasnt been mapped and thoroughly explored and plotted and pillaged. Thats what the Atlas is for.
We will be giving our good friend The funny man with pictures a visit.

Make sure you select the larger canvas size, or else your model will look like shit. its true im not joking it will.After you change the resolution, hit Set Automatic Layout

do the thing the arrow says, its good for you. then hit ok if your ok with 100.0 being a number that exists.

Ok now your in this thing, this is the texture atlas. Live2D calls all images from this one texture sheet. if they are overlapping you will have trouble. so make sure they're nice and spaced.
In the event of an emergency landing or you run out of room, you can open up another sheet by clicking Texture -> Add Texture. Put all your stuff in there that doesn't fit, the universe gets to live another day thanks to you.BEEWOO BEEWOO WE HAVE A QUIRK ALERTyeah this program is fucky. Sometimes when you import an image after the fact, like mid project, a piece will just be cut off. This is because the texture atlas mesh (the blue bits around the cutup layers) are cutting off a piece of the image. To remedy this hit up the pen and the triangle friends and they should help. Draw a bit more mesh-y bits and presto bingo fixed.

Ok so now things are on screen. The '''''Hierarchy'''' as i've seen many guides call it, is pretty much the entire make of a Live2D model. We'll get to that after i introduce our fighters.
take a sip of coffee now, this is long...

Warp Deformers: Their icon is the funky waffle. These things are pretty much keyframed distortions. They latch onto the images you provide and specify, moving and warping them how you want them to be moved and warped.
Generally, you shouldnt touch the base image. You would typically want a deformer to move that for you. There are some exceptions like when something doesnt work for you or when its such a minute change it doesnt matter, just make a judgement call and go off the path when you feel you need to.

Paramaters: Oh paramaters, how i love thee. Sike. These things are fucking annoying. Parameters are the sliders that you keyframe deformers to. These are what make things move in a way that the program understands.
Unless you'd like to drag everything around forever and pretend its moving, you're gonna need these. They are relatively complex so we will get there when its more relevant.
Live2D users when they start seeing yellow dots.

Rotation Deformers: Not to be confused with the other deformer mentioned, the carrot deformer, but definitely to be confused with air hockey. (the carrot deformer does not exist.)
The rotation deformer rotates an image on an axis away from its base. So if you place the red circle at the point you'd expect something to rotate from, then it will rotate from there. Probably the simplest one.

Deform Path Edit Tool: This pretty much lets you make any flavor of line you'd like, and bend it according to a curve. The only use i personally got out of this was for blinking. Figure out some creative uses im sure theres more. Fire comes to mind i guess. idk.

The Hierarchy

Its all been leading up to this.Long story short, Live2D works by daisy-chaining 1 million different deformers on top of each other. Theres a pretty logical order behind it, its just really annoying and dumb to set up.

A good way to think about it is, what moves when you move your head? Well lets see, your eyes, your mouth, your unending ever-growing sense of dread that you have only scratched the surface of this program. You get the picture. Its ideal to work your way up from the stuff that would move other things by it moving. Body moves neck, neck moves head, head moves stuff attached to head etcetera.

ABSOLUTELY CRITICALLY IMPORTANT

You will not get far without studying the interfamilial dynamics of parent and child relationships. There are parent objects and there are child objects. Simple enough, you have to string stuff together in such a way that it makes sense idk how else to word that hey wouldja look at those pictures below here.

(inside face rotation)

Example of Eyebrow and Eye Deformer Hierarchy. Obviously make two of these for each eye or however many eyes or eyebrows your character might have im not judging.

Hair Hierarchy

Mouth Hierarchy

The stuff collapsed into a thing is a child, whereas the one ontop is the parent. This is CRITICAL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! i promise, i paid, i pad, ipeed.

This is an example of a generally finished Hierarchy, you want this mostly done before you do anything. Notice how Body Warp Z is the parent to pretty much everything. this dudes busy. Once you learn the general gist of how this works its easy i swear.You can probably get away with copying 95% of this, theres some useless deformers for your model in here.I've probably said hierarchy more times in this doc than ive said hierarchy in my entire life total.

Sadly, Box isn't being used here.

Welcome, come in. Make yourself comfortable.
You must be here because you're interested in becoming a scholar of color.
Now, I must warn you, this is a dangerous path. Few make it through the trials of color before realizing I barely know what i'm talking about and finding a better tutorial.
No matter! I shall impart my limited wisdom on thee, regardless. So find the most colorful beach towel you have, drape it over your shoulders and lets get started.

THE VARIOUS WAYS OF VIEWING COLORS

Many drawing programs have many, many different ways of displaying colors to you for some reason.

For this, I'll be using the Clip Studio Paint color square, as it is the best version of the color square, and the color square is the best way to visualize colors. Please go away color triangle users I don't want to hear it.

So now that you have this four sided object, lets go ahead and explore every nook and cranny of its square body.Within this square there is a faction war, the four nations.

what you need to do to make good use of colors is pick the right balance of faction members and make them like each other.of course you can utilize each faction on its own with no mixing, but the use cases for that are generally niche and I wouldnt worry about that right now. Once you learn to experiment it will feel more natural.

The mix rate and usage really depends on what kind of art style you are going for, but generally I tend to stick to more saturated colors because they make my eyes feel good.Generally speaking, keeping the saturation mostly similar, maybe within 40-60% of the extremes is a good idea.I am going to say this once, and never again. Use you're own judgement and experiment. There are no rules in art, only suggestions.

THE VALUE OF FRIENDSHIP

Values are what realllllllllllly matter in art. As long as your values are on point you can use pretty much whatever colors you want and it will work.
Our weird sight orbs use the lightness of things to distinguish importance, so keep in brain good idea.

The one on the left is much nicer to look at and just makes more sense. These are pretty old images i dug up because i didnt feel like making new ones. But you can clearly see how the image on the left has more depth to it.
Value differences do not have to be this stark, the eye is VERY capable of seeing even single percentage value differences. Keep this in mind and weaponize it. Make everyones eyes happy.

IMPORTANT STUFF: LIGHTEST
v
MEDIUM STUFF: MEDIUMEST
v
LESS IMPORTANT STUFF: DARKEST

cmere i gotta tell you something, yeah lean in. cmon dont be shy get real nice and close. alright you close now? get this in your head.

COLORS. ARENT. REAL.

yeah thats right you heard me, sunlight is actually a giant flashlight, mirrors are portals that the government is keeping from us and the birds have eyes.

Please. PLEASE I never want to see you pick this gross fucking color for skin ever again.

Nothing has a color, it sounds completely insane, and it sounds very obvious at the same time. Look at some grass, touch the grass (god knows you need to). Notice its color, now that you've finished imagining that, instead of doing it.
WHAT COLOR DO YOU THINK OF????

Does that look green to you? Didn't think so.
Objects have a color that they like to be, sure, but environmental lighting and many other factors contribute to the color of an object way more than most beginners think.

You can even test this yourself, notice your skin tone when standing near different lights. Pure white light will make your skin look far less saturated, where orange-y lights make you look borange-r.

So stop using gross brown for tables because its 'table color'. Putrid Green for 'grass color'. You get the idea.

FUCK AROUND

The ultimate tip.
Just do different things. Today I will use a purple here for some reason. Adhere to values and it will look cool.