What sorts of MMD Plugins are there? MMD Plugin Manager? MMD Plugins. Plugin MMD. More MMD plugins?
Quick links at top
My fork, which has a couple bugfixes by some guy naming himself Duke Nukem, great guy, the best.
The one I forked from, which may or may not be updated.
Usage is below and also in the Githubs wiki
Also, unless directed otherwise, use the oldlist version, as I’m currently trying (and procrastinating) on getting the thing to work with the english MME.
I just… Stumbled over this?
Ahhh, the wonders of the Japanese MMD community just making things long before I even think of them. Guess that’s part of being a latecomer, but how come nobody else found these? Or maybe they have, I’m rather isolated from any sort of “community”, and I’m not about to look around for anyone outside of the folks here at LearnMMD, unless I need to grab a model.
Either way, while researching for a different, unwritten article entirely, in desperation, I just searched up different things relating to MMD, and I just stumbled over… Either Google or Yandex, I forgot, but it just gave me this result of a GitHub search of everything tagged “mmd”.
And what I found could only be called a treasure trove. Now, on the top, you have a lot of common stuff, most notably the line of Blender plugins assisting in MMD, especially in the sad era of Post-2.8 Blender that has no .x export, and as you scroll down a bit, you find some interesting things like nanoem, which is teeny tiny modern MMD, running on OpenGL, DX11 (MMD uses DX9) and Metal, for Apple computers, if you fancy those. I’ll get back to that one after it matured a bit, the camera is a bit wonky to control and there’s no keyboard shortcuts to speak of, and there’s a lack of contrast in the UI, making readability a bit difficult. Feel free to try, maybe those things don’t bother you.
But as you dig down…
And down…
And down…
And down…
(Or just sort it differently)
Other than some other things sharing the same “mmd” shortening, you start to get into the interesting gunk. Well, even digging down slightly you get things like hime-display, which my guess suggests that it allows you to use MMD models with it as a v-tubing application, among other desktop display stuff, CooCoo3D, a chinese-made(judging by lack of Kana and usage of Bilibili) uncompiled MMD renderer using DX12, and vmd-sizing, which appears to assist you in fixing VMD files for differently sized skeletons.
But if you click that Load More at the bottom… The Deep Dive begins! ROCK AND STONE!
We really start to find the interesting stuff. I’m just gonna drop this dudes entire github profile, MES40 interests me, and should stretch DX9 that bit further.
…
Okay, I’d show more, but without trying a lot of these myself, I can’t really verify the quality of these. Dig deep, and discover things yourself. Let’s get to what we’re REALLY after…
The plugin install manager
If you’re an avid reader of the entire site for some odd reason, you might know of my MMAccel article, a powerful plugin that enables you to create some maaad shortcuts. In there, edited after I went scrying a bit into its source code, I discovered just how MMAccel specifically works with MME and MMPlus, even though you’re replacing the d3d9.dll that the both use, and theorized a world in which we could slap together our own plugin manager, and make our own plugins, with the knowledge gained from staring really hard at some source code.
Essentially, the ability to install and uninstall plugins freely.
Uhmm yeahhhh uhmmmmmm, they already kinda did that… And there’s (excuse my language) a hellolalot more plugins for MMD than was previously thought of? At least by me? Some of these are even on GitHub!
Now, the one I am about to link here is not the original. The original hasn’t been updated since 2017, which I unfortunately must remind some of our slightly older readers is… Six years ago… Oh my…
So here’s a more recently updated one… Except…
If it weren’t for a little issue…
It didn’t work. Or, rather, it wouldn’t fetch the updated list and it overwrote the list with an empty file, making it fall back into a hardcoded list.
Turns out this Treasure needed some polishing to work properly, aye…
So unless our being here in Japan is accepting pull requests, here’s my fork, which for all intents and purposes may well be the one we’ll work on.
I was actually gonna make a little comic about this, but procrastination go brr and I want this article out there.
I don’t actually know how to code anything at all, so don’t expect any major feature updates unless someone else rolls in and does the work. A guy that literally names himself Duke Nukem on a telegram chat full of schizoids made the two fixes necessary to get this working. Great guy, seriously. Did NOT know he did C# at all before this.
So, how do we use this?
Crack the Zip file open from the releases file, and it should automatically grab the lates packages.json file, if it is my fork at least.
As is tradition, no installation needed, so you can just open the .exe file like that. It’s going to ask you where the heck MMD is, so just point it to your MMD copy. HOWEVER: I HIGHLY RECOMMEND that you make a new copy by either unzipping from your pre-existing MMD zip, or downloading a new one if you deleted the original zip file, if you have installed any plugins before.. Also recommended for this is changing your computer to Japanese locale. This is currently untested with any other locale.
The first thing it wants you to do is to install MMDPlugin, which by my guess is our new handler for all of these hooks to the other plugins.
The way it works is actually super simplistic, it wants you to go to the bowlroll link shown, and download it yourself, then you just drag the zip file in or hit the select zip button if you like doing it old-school, then it checks for a sum (checksum), which works to identify it as the proper plugin, then it just works all of that in.
You simply click on the plugin you wish,
Click the link, and it takes you to the site you get it
Now you can choose to drag it in, or click “select zip” which brings up the file browser.
When you select it and it succeeds…
It opens a readme file, and then you can open MMD and check if it is installed!
MMDPlugin by itself is empty. But it handles the rest, so…
Some (Most notably, MMAccel for me) are outdated, to say the least. The one in here is 1.6, but as of writing this, 2.0.9 is out. I tried, but it didn’t want to work with 2.0.9, so modification is needed to either remove the sumchecking entirely, or a different fork with a more frequently updated packages_list.json file is needed… Oh, wait. I’m the guy doing that now. Check my version to see if it’s updated, then. I’ll look at adding in the english MME and my own fork of MMAccel.
Ah well, so it goes. The rest are installed the same way.
Have the fun installing the plugins and trying them out! Over time, as I myself get used to these new tools, I’ll make some articles, unless a burgeoning author beats me to it.