VRoid Studio is perhaps the most popular VTuber Avatar software out there, espc for beginners without much experience with complex 3D Modeling Software. Sadly, it is only officially available under Windows, but with the power of Steam and Proton on our side, we can even run it under linux (with only minimal changes required for the full experience).

The first start

To get VRoid Studio, just head over to their steam page , or search after "VRoid Studio" in your steam client. After adding them to your library (it's free afterall!), you can select an Proton Version and launch it for the first time. I use for all games via proton the GloriousEggroll custom distribution , as it often has a bit more compatibility with games and software; I recommend always using the latest version (for obvious reasons).

Once you started, you can either explore some of their example characters, or dive in creating your very own.

Booth

While VRoid Studio comes with a ton of presets (and even cat ears!), you will relativly soon come across the need for custom clothing, accessories and other elements. For this, the VTubing sphere often uses booth.pm . It's primarily tailored to the enourmous japanese VTubing scene, but they also slowly but surely work on providing services for international users.

To sign up with booth, you need an pixiv Account; The Setup here is very streamlined and you need just an email address. Linking VRoid Studio to your booth account is also working without any problems, which I'm very surprised; typically these things just straigt up don't work due to windows and browser stuff just not wanting to work together.

In order to add items from booth to use in VRoid Studio, you either can try to use the BOOTH Library Manager, or manage them directly in your "closet" in VRoid Studio. To add items to it, you just need to click the "DL with VRoid Studio" link of an item it's booth page (sometimes hidden in "Other Downloads")...

Image of an BOOTH item (a sock set) with an popup reading: "Failed to launch app. Would you like to move to the guide page?".

Uhhhh, yeah... It turns out that this feature works by opening an custom link, starting with vroid.closet://. And proton currently has no ability to detect whenever applications register such an custom URI protocol in windows to map it to the linux equivalent. So we'll need to do some manual tinkering after all...

The chase for the protocol handler

First we'll need to inspect how booth ideally want to handle such links; to do that, we'll use protontricks on the application in order to start regedit inside it's wine prefix: protontricks 1486350 regedit. Then you either search after the string "vroid", or simply open the following path, if you're interested: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\vroid.closet\shell\open\command; in there should be an empty key with the following value we actually need for this:

Plain Text
1
"S:\steamapps\common\VRoid Studio\VRoidStudio.exe" -batchmode -logfile "C:/users/steamuser/AppData/LocalLow/pixiv/VRoid Studio\batchmode.log" "%1"

Great! It just uses the main executable and gives it a few arguments. Small hint: only "%1" actually matters for basic functionality. Testing this in an wine shell (protontricks 1486350 winecmd) you can test this very quickly if you want.

Using this you can create an new one in ~/.local/share/applications/:

Ini
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
[Desktop Entry]
Name=Open in VRoid Studio
Exec=protontricks-launch --appid 1486350 "S:\\\\steamapps\\\\common\\\\VRoid Studio\\\\VRoidStudio.exe" -batchmode %u
Icon=steam_icon_1486350
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=Game;
MimeType=x-scheme-handler/vroid.closet;

Afterwards you might need to run update-desktop-database ~/.local/share/applications in order to update the neccessary caches. To see if the file is correctly registered, you can run xdg-mime query default x-scheme-handler/vroid.closet; it should output the filename of your .desktop file.

One pitfall you want to avoid is to use quotes in the Exec key around the %u parameter; I did this the first time as I assumed this would be run via an shell-like function, but it just adds those quotes verbatim to the argument, screwing everything up.

If you want, you can do an quick test by running xdg-open vroid.closet://... using one of your links you can get by inspecting the webpage with your browser tools as you click the "DL with VRoid Studio" button; it should log an failed attempt to open https://booth.pm/downloadables/1448720/deeplink?client=vroid&type=zip&variation_id=4142025 or similar, and the Location header will give you the correct vroid.closet:// link.

(For all interested; here is the link to the item I used to test this: https://booth.pm/en/items/2524890 )

Conclusion

VRoid Studio is an great software for starting out with creating your own VTubing avatar; with booth as an great marketplace to quickly get some small items to make your character pop a bit more, with some great free or very low-priced items out there. While a little tinkering is required to make the experience work under linux, it is great to see how far we've come to allow linux users to have an nearly exact same workflow as under windows.