Live2D's Cubism manual turns a flat illustration into a rig

The setup

Live2D Cubism Editor is the modeling tool Live2D Inc. publishes for turning a 2D illustration into a riggable character, the software underlying most 2D VTuber avatars. Its own product page describes it in one line: 'software that directly animates your original drawings.' The Cubism Editor Manual, the primary source here, documents the pipeline the software enforces, not the marketing pitch, and this entry treats it as a living document reflecting the manual as retrieved on 16 September 2026, not any single version's release notes.

What the documents show

The manual's table of contents lays out a fixed order. It opens with 'Production Flow' and 'Material division / PSD creation,' instructing a rigger to separate an illustration into layered parts first. Modeling then covers PSD import, texture and part editing, followed by 'ArtMesh' creation, with both an 'Automatic Mesh generator' and manual mesh editing. Deformers come next: a 'Warp Deformer' and 'Rotation Deformer,' organized into a 'Parent-Child Hierarchy Structure' so moving one deformer carries its children correctly. Only after meshes and deformers exist does the manual introduce 'Parameters,' the sliders that later drive expressions and tracking, followed by animation sections for keyforms, timelines and physics. The Cubism SDK's own product page confirms the boundary the manual assumes: the Editor 'creates models and animation files,' while a separate SDK 'renders the assets in a dev environment,' so the manual's scope stops at a finished model rather than how a tracking app later drives it.

The craft

For a rigger, this ordering is also a workflow constraint: parts must exist before meshes are drawn on them, meshes before deformers bend them, and deformers must sit in a parent-child hierarchy before a parameter can move several together convincingly. A blinking eye is not one deformer but a hierarchy of meshes and deformers tied to one eye-open parameter, and the parent-child section is what makes that slider move eyelid, eyelash and eyeball meshes together. This is why re-editing an illustration after rigging is costly: upstream changes can invalidate mesh and deformer work built on top.

Keeping the creator in control

Because the manual treats modeling as a strict pipeline, it documents where a rigger's labor actually lives, in mesh placement and deformer hierarchies, not the illustration alone. That distinction matters for anyone commissioning rigging separately from illustration, since the two are distinct, separately skilled stages. This is editorial: a creator negotiating a rig commission should ask which stage a quoted price covers, since 'rigging' can mean basic mesh and deformer setup or full parameter and physics work.

• Does a commissioned rig cover parts and meshes only, or also deformers, parameters and physics?
• If the source illustration changes later, how much existing mesh and deformer work has to be redone?
• Which Cubism Editor version was the model built in, and does the target tracking app support that export format?

The manual's real subject is not how to draw a character but how to take that drawing apart and reassemble it as a hierarchy a computer can move, and that structure, more than any single button, is what a Live2D rig actually is.