MikuMikuMoving ... A different program!

When you open up MMM, it looks different and it has a different setup ... and it's not like how MMD works!

You see that icons, tabs and buttons are in different places and it takes a while to figure out how to delete motions, load stages, render videos, and so on.

You can load a model by clicking on the "Load Model" button, up at the top in the File tab, or you can click the button down at the bottom left. Then you can select your model and open it up. Like MMD, MMM tells you the model information. MMM doesn't include any basic models ... so you will want to download MMD to get hold of the Model folder containing Miku and her friends.

Next to the Load Accessory icon and the Remove icon, up the top and at the bottom, there is another icon called Import Motion. To delete a motion, go to the edit tab and press select all and click on Remove. And next to Import Motion, is Import Pose.

You can also see other icons that allow you to import an effect, with that, you can assign and enable effects. You can Load Audio and Load VSQ. So by clicking on these icons, you can load up a file just like MMD!

By just looking at the File tab, you can also see icons for you to open project files, render to picture, render AVI and settings.

In settings, you can set your screen size, adjust things, and set MMM to the way you want it to work.

As you can see, below the frame bars, there is a tab that says Sequence and below the Sequence tab is a line from negative to positive, that makes all your frames smaller or bigger in size, that shows your motion data, and an Audio tab that shows your audio.

But, if you can see the tracks in the Audio tab, it allows you to put in more than one song or a sound effect! Also, you can add another track by clicking on Add another track icon next to the scribble looking icon above the sequence tab.

The caption icon allows you to put captions in your video, they are also called subtitles or teletext and if you see the letter T above the star down at the bottom left, that tab allows to you make your subtitles big, small, bold, set the duration at frames, set the letter space and colour!
In the other tabs, you can look at your effects and plugins as well.

Now focusing on your model in the models tab, you can see the interpolation curve and the letters beside it stand for Rotation, the axis X,Y and Z and Motion. You can also see the copy and paste icons down the bottom. Next to that, you can see the Visible, Self Shadow, Add Blending and Physics.

Also, looking at the Edge, that will help you with the thickness of the model and the edge colour. Next to the IK boxes, you can see the smiley face icon that will help you with motion of the mouth, eyes, brows and etc. But there is no select all button, you can right click on the screen next to your model that selects all the bones or you can move your mouse around the model that will show the bones.

Now, if you see the hand icon, to your surprise, with that tab, you can automatically set the model hands to a fist! That's almost like cheating isn't it???

With the blue icon, you can position your model to an exact spot, place or angle.

The accessories icon allows you to set your accessory to a bone just like the MMD setup but the camera settings give you lightning, light colour, gravity, self shadow settings, tone Cures, gray scales, and the normal camera settings.

The star icon is for the effect settings. If you can see on the right down the bottom, you can set the camera to a bone, model and set it to the front, back, left, right, up, down, and back to the normal camera view. There is the volume as well.

You can set your screen to black or white in the screen tab and turn off the axis in the view tab up the top. If you notice when you import an audio file, in the audio tab, you can drag the audio track to a frame!!! No more editing!!!

And if you see the play button, the play button turns into a stop button when your playing your video and you can pause it as well, however, it does not go back to frame 0, it pauses at the frame you stopped at. Looking at the tick icon, that's to register bones, accessories etc to a frame.

The Kinect settings and the recording buttons in the Kinect tab are just like the ones in MMD so you should be familiar with them if you use Kinect.

When you are going to render, it already sets 0 to your ending frame already but it doesn't do it the second time when you make a video if you didn't turn off MMM before loading it up back again for a new one. But now it asks for screen size, video compressor, background, present and background. Don't forget to give it an output file!

When you click on Start Render, it doesn't change to a big screen recording, it simply starts rendering in the small screen of the program and the small window starts showing you where it's at in percentage and when it's up to 100%, the render finishes and the small window goes away.

Now that's the basics! Have fun playing with MMM, there are still a lot more things to discover!

Kazuki Matsuoka