The bridge nobody documents: connect a local Ollama brain to a real-time 3D VRM face with voice, lip-sync and expressions. The four services, the ports they talk on, and the two traps that cost us days — the thinking-mode stall and the open-mic mistake.
Our presenter, her news-anchor self, and every character voice in our videos share infrastructure: one local LLM, swappable voices, swappable faces. The architecture that makes characters cheap.
The full blueprint for a fully-local AI companion — speech in, animated talking character out — running on one consumer GPU. This is the map; every stage links to a hands-on guide.
From a single character image to a fully rigged, animated 3D model you can pose, dress and drive in the browser — an autonomous cloud pipeline with zero local GPU time.