Lexasio's Steampunk Teto & Miku star in MMD "Kiss Me" animation

Where can I download Lexasio’s Steampunk Teto & Miku? How can I make my own “Kiss Me” MMD animation? Where can I get an MMD nightclub stage?

Lexasio’s Steampunk Teto & Miku star
in my newest “Kiss Me” animation!

That is always a great place to start a new animation project: find a new beautiful MMD model, or two!

Lexasio’s Steampunk Teto & Miku are available for download from the dA page. There are no tricks; simply click the download link.

These models have a nice vibe; they feel so comfortable! The “steampunk” aspect starts with those dangerous looking goggles. I was hoping my girls wouldn’t scratch themselves while dancing; I am not insured! I like Miku’s short twin-tails that could use a good brushing! The light “stretch-cotton” top and the quilted denim hot-pant suit, almost overalls, is very appealing. And dig those all-terrain dance shoes!

The Animation…

I know: This is the third “Kiss Me” animation I have done in the last couple of months. That song is engraved upon my brain and I cannot erase it! So when I find a pair of new models… “Kiss me”!

I reverted back to the Strip Club nightclub stage by amiamy111. I used it in my old Miku’s “Pity Party” animation. A fun nightclub set with a removable “pole-dance pole”… removed for my animation. That stage is in a larger scale than I like to use, so I opened the stage model in PMXE and adjusted it to a new size of 0.80… 80% size and saved it with a new name so that I could keep the original. When you load the stage, it is a PMX model with one bone… and the floor-level is higher than you will want to see, so use the Y axis to bring the entire stage down to MMD model shoe-sole level.

The stage is a large area and I felt that I wanted to move my dancers out towards the front which left a whole lot of room behind them, so, I added a rose-colored drape from the old LearnMMD Auditorium Stage to hide the depth of the stage and it worked perfectly.

I found that the “Kiss Me” dance routine stays pretty much in one place on the floor and it did just fit on the area of the stage that I had chosen. I used those VMD motion files without making any adjustments. Yes, there are a few collisions where a dancers arm moves through her shirt or shorts, but not a big deal and I did not take the time to fix them.

I also needed an audience. And the only “audience” I have is in the Theater Seats that are included in the Auditorium Stage linked to, above. I shifted and positioned that set of seats until I was happy with the location. I purposely included the back of those seats and the silhouettes of some of the patrons to show in my camerawork: I wanted to remind the viewer that the audience is out there in the club.

My usual Shaders!

My recent animations have featured the older shaders: Real Figure Shader and Real Material Shader. These give a nice photographic 3D effect without resorting to Ray-MMD. I start by opening MME and Set Effect to the entire model with Real Material Shader. Then I EDIT and Subset-Extract to add Real Figure Shader the skin areas… face, neck, body. These models have a few more parts around the eyes, and such, so be sure to check that you have ’em all. I believe that I missed the inside of the mouth on both models and I think I see that lack on Teto as I watch the video.

I also add SSAO-Lite for a nice depth of color.

Lighting!

When you use those shaders, the angle of the house lights becomes very important! As you first load the shaders, you can see your whole model appear to go dark. It’s not really dark, it just requires that you adjust the lights to shine where you need them. I also bring down the brightness from the usual 154 to something less that looks right.

Right from frame zero, I adjust the color tabs separately so as to get the image brightness and skin-tones that I like.

I went crazy with setting the lights!

This is a complicated set of motions and I had the camera flying all over the place… up close, looking up from the floor, looking up from behind and above… so quite often the model was in the shade! After I had all of the camerawork done, I spent a fat long time scrolling through the animation looking for dark scenes. I went to frame zero and copied that light diamond as my basis for the whole animation. Then, as I scrolled, I would adjust the lights for each scene and register.

After that scene, I would register that same setting and then within a few frames, I would paste that original frame-zero diamond to bring the scene back to “normal” lighting. Scroll a bit into the next scene and evaluate the light. Make adjustments… and after the scene, paste that frame-zero diamond again for the next scene. All in all, I spent six-hours creating this animation. Most of the time creating the new camerawork and then adjusting the lights to work with the models and the camerawork!

Camerawork!

My previous “Kiss Me” tutorial write-up included a link to download the Camera.VMD that I made to go with this motion data. I started with that camera motion file and built upon it to create my NEW CAMERA.VMD VERSION that you can download. It is a little more fun than the older one with more close-ups and more camera motion… and a little more “fan service”, too! Unlike an actual stage camera, your MMD camera can go anywhere!

The color Disco Ball…

I added the DiscoLight Effect v3 to bring even more motion and more color onto my stage. This effect works very well. You can adjust the lights to get just what you want to see! That disco ball loads at a huge size, right between the models feet. First you load the controller.pmd and then the discolight.x file. You can use its one bone to position the ball where you want it. In the accessory manipulation you can adjust the size of the ball. I set an Si of 0.01 … only 1% of original size. This does not effect the light, just the size of the visible ball… and even at that tiny size, there is one scene in my video where there is a black dot centered on the dance-floor when the camera is looking down from overhead!

TrueCamera adds soft focus and motion blur!

Lastly, I added TrueCamera for a bit of image diffusion in my scene. You are supposed to set that TrueCamera effect onto a bone in your model so that the model is always in focus. I had TWO models… so I, instead, loaded a dummy-bone and placed it between my two models at their eye-level and then attached TrueCamera to that dummy-bone. So, now both models are pretty much in focus all of the time and I still get some soft-focus of the background surfaces. I set the Si size to 2.0 in order to get the TrueCamera effect that I wanted.

And the motion blur that TrueCamera brings, really does work!
I made these screen-captures by pausing my video mid-play.