Holotech Studios is taking you one step closer to the Metaverse with the 1.0 launch of Animaze. As the successor to FaceRig, today’s Animaze launch brings new features and updates to the software, including a full Twitch integration. It’s just one more way for us to push the limits of Vtubing!
During the Early Access period, we had the opportunity to examine how Vtubers use Animaze. Based on these observations and feedback from the community, we made sure to provide different options for different types of users, including a free-to-use option for casual users and a premium experience for more professional users. And now, over 30 updates, 15 brand new avatars, and countless exciting partnerships, and one year later, we’re prepared to bring our best selves to the game and present Animaze 1.0! This is still just the beginning for Animaze, and you should continue to expect more updates from us in 2021 and onwards.
Here is a brief view of all the improvements we brought, compared to our predeceasing app, FaceRig:
And now it’s time for the changes we want to present to you today. We’re extremely excited to present to you:
- Twitch Integration: This new feature gives Animaze a whole new level of interactivity and entertainment to avatar streaming! This new feature allows streamers to automatically trigger avatar animations, voice effects, emotes and more based on audience interactions such as subs, follows, keywords in chat, and raids. We’ve also put together a guide on how to set it up right here.
Watch on YouTube - PNGs as emotes: Get ready to let all your emotions free on your streams with Animaze’s new feature that allows you to import whatever png files you want to use as emotes in your streams and videos!
Find everything you need to know to take advantage of this awesome new feature in our manual here.
Watch on YouTube - Ultraleap Gemini integration: Animaze now supports the fifth generation of the Ultraleap Gemini hand-tracking. This tracker matches the position of your virtual hands to your real ones more closely than ever before.
Watch on YouTube - Background customizations: We’ve added a new flow to open new creative prospects for your streams. Use the blur slider to add depth, the tint background option with a color of your choice to quickly repurpose backgrounds, or the solid color background selector to change the background image to a solid color of your choice. You can find more information about this in our dedicated article.
- Update translations for all the Animaze products: The Animaze Desktop app, Animaze iOS app, and the Animaze Editor have updated versions in Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, and Spanish! We’re working really hard to update our documentation into Japanese at the moment, so there’s more to come!
- EULA update - We updated our EULA at the request of our partner, Live2D. As with all 3rd party extendable applications that support VTubing with Live2D avatars, if you earn more than 20 million Yen per year, Live2D requires a separate publication agreement and fee with Live2D. This EULA update applies only to Live2D model users.
We're also including a bunch of bug fixes and tweaks:
- Fixed UI issue with Quickscenes keybindings being swapped.
- Fixed color belt issue when the retexturing warning was displayed.
- Fixed multiple file dialogs issue when selecting an image for retexturing.
- Updated the Learn to Stream slides to include some info on virtual camera video format selection for OBS.
- Special actions now exclude head and body retargeting (avatar goes to neutral and plays the animation) when activated. This behavior is by default, although it can be changed through Editor flow on particular avatars and special actions.
- Updated the Recently Used shelf flow in galleries to load faster.
- Fixed issue with certain VRM models that had meshes stretched or offset unintentionally. Avatars that exhibit this issue need to be reimported.
- Fixed an issue with Broadcasting action from StreamDeck.
- Tweaked performance on stackable emotes.
- Fixed account creation flow crash.
- Fixed audio input crash when no microphone is present on the system.
- Tweaked audio lip-syncs behavior when blending with face tracking.
- eye wide open now removes the weight on eyes squint and l/r/u/d blend shapes.
- added Popular Avatars and Editor’s Pick shelves in Avatar Gallery.
- increased smoothing on BodyUpDown and BodyPitch by 25% on all webcam face tracking profiles.
- changed cel-shading outline method to display fewer artifacts on intersecting meshes.
- added a VRM lighting preset in the Backgrounds Customization section.
As always, we love hearing what you think about the new content and Animaze! Tell us what you’d like to see added to Animaze on our Discord server, email us at support[@]animaze[.]us, or message us on Twitter!
Happy Streaming With Animaze 1.0!