Twitch as over the years become a lot less about gaming, and a lot more about personalities and community. With "just talking" regularly claiming the nr.1 spot on the site. I've never really been a fan of esport, nor all that interested in watching strangers play games, so as this change slowly took place my interest in the plattform has slowly grown. This change can not only be attributes by the emergence of cheap professional hardware, but more importantly, software. We currently have:

• Professional audio and video capture equipment readily available and cheap. Good examples are RTX Voice and VoiceMeter. Which by utilizing hardware AI cores (on nVidia) can give you crystal clear sound and audio mixing from a variety of sources.
• Advanced studio streaming software like OBS+Streamlabs. This gives us studio features like Scenes, transitions, widgets, color-key transparency, layers, backgrounds, effects, and everything else a streamer might need.
• Affordable real-time 3D motion capture and VR That last part is what has captured my interest the most.

I regularly watch people with full body VT tracking dancing to music, playing games or just hanging out together. I also watch several "VTubers" that with a simple web-cam and optionally a leap-motion, gets full facial tracking, movements, and arm/hand tracking. This new landscape has allowed us to seamlessly merge with virtual 3D characters, and to be whatever we want to be at any moment. This has been a fascinating journey and I've dived deep into how these things works behind the scenes. Namley the software and the 3D models. There are plenty of free models and clothing stores to get your avatar up and running. Otherwise, getting an artist to make you a comission is surprisingly cheap. You could of course spend a lot of money for a proper model from a 3D artist from scratch, but you could also pay an artist on fiver to make a VROID model for you based on your preferences. The model of the right side for example is something i've put together using 3D assets I've bought or got for free from booth / vroid hub. This can quickly turn into a rabbit hole where a lot of computer knowledge becomes necessary and unless you are determined to learn about Unity and 3D modeling I'd suggesting getting an artists help. For new artists I'd strongly recommend starting off at Vroid tutorials, and slowly explore 3D assets stores. Or maybe you don't really have an intrest in this and want to focus on your stream and content, pay an actual artist on fiverr, they are very affordable and the results can be surprising!

This particular model took about a whole weekend to print, and required multiple iterations and modifications to an already public 3D model we had found for printing. Part of me wants to give it a proper paint job, but another really enjoys the cleaness/pureness of the clean plastics. Since this would be my first paint-job I should probably practise on something less delicate. My goal, eventually, is to have a large set of every MechWarrior chassis out there (that's quite a lot!), but that is currently pretty far into the future. I want to thank my bother Viktor Welander (3D/CAD artist) for this wonderful and rather special birthday present. If you are intrested, send him a message, as he is looking for new projects to take on.