Reggie Replies to interesting comments and emails. Send Reggie your question or tell him what you are doing to learn how to use MMD. What have you discovered?
KayLeek wrote: i need help on motion data
how do i use it
HELP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
reply back please!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Here’s the Long Answer about how to use Motion Data:
Wanna save motion data from your dance?
Let’s pretend you have the Sample Dance open and you want to have Rin doing the dance instead of Miku. You want to copy the motion data from Miku and paste it into Rin.
Use the Range-Select windows under the Frame Counter area.
Set the range for this dance as 0 – 800. See that All Frame is selected.
See that you have Miku Selected (not Camera/Light/Accessory)
Click the Range-Sel button. See that All the diamonds are red. Click COPY.
Now delete Miku. Load Rin. Click PASTE.
All of Miku’s diamonds now drop into place for Rin. Click PLAY and watch Rin do Miku’s dance.
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Want to Save a Motion Data file?
To save that dance motion as a file that you can use later:
After you have the Range selected … and the diamonds are Red … click COPY. That puts all of those diamonds into memory.
Now got to FILE and choose SAVE MOTION DATA. You will be asked to give it a name. Name it and click SAVE.
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Want to use a Motion Data File?
To use a motion file, FIRST go to the frame where you want to paste that file data. If you are aligned with Frame Zero … the data will start at Zero. If you are aligned with Frame 57 … that data will start at Frame 57.
Go to FILE and LOAD MOTION DATA. Pick the file you want. That’s it!
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You can download motion data files online … YouTube … Drop them into your USER folder inside the MOTION folder so that MMD can find it easily.
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Motion files have a .VMD extension. Pose Files have a .VPD extension. Pose Files work the same … except they are only a Single Frame. You make a pose file by highlighting the diamonds in a single frame … go to FILE and click SAVE POSE DATA. To use a pose file, go the frame you want, be sure the right character is selected … and click LOAD POSE FILE.
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Now you know everything! Have fun … keep asking questions!
Rim wrote: When I try to load stages and new models, they either don’t load, or do but no color, it’s all white, except for the shading and some random bits of colour… my new models don’t work?
I DO HAVE a fix for that …
What happens is that you are downloading models from Japanese sources … and their file names use Japanese characters. Your computer is substituting English gibberish for those Japanese characters.
The fix is to download some free software that lets you open a ZIP file, keeping those original file names intact.
Here’s my article about that problem: https://learnmmd.com/http:/learnmmd.com/opening-japanese-models-in-mikumikudance-7-39-sometimes-they-don%E2%80%99t-work/
Read my notes … click that orange link, there, to mikudance.info‘s HELP page … do everything, just right … and you will be in business. (You will like MikuDance.info! … plenty of models and accessories to download … updated often!)
Lemme know if you need more help with it.
SarahP wrote: How can I change the clothes on my models?
Using MMD, alone, you cannot change the clothes on your model. The models are designed as single units. They seem to have fabrics, belts, and chains that could be exchanged for other elements … but the models are actually only one piece. There is now software, just recently available in English, PMD Editor, that let’s you modify your models or even create a new one! Also called PMDE … PMD Editor is getting written-up in the pages of LearnMMD.com. Check it out!
BigS Writes:
Hey, I’m kind of new to MikuMiku Dance and I just have a few questions that I could not find on your (totally awesome) site. Btw, thanks for making your site, it helped alot.
Thanks for asking! Yup … that’s a lot of questions … Here are my answers.
#1 Submit a frame? … I guess that’d be Register the pose in that frame … Every time you move a bone you want to click the Register button in the dark blue Bone Manipulation area under the lower left of the Stage Screen. What I do, that also works well, is just hold your left hand over the Enter key on the keyboard. Every time you move a bone, click Enter … that’s another way to Register the bone. If you move a bunch of bones and THEN decide to Register, you can click on one of the diamonds in that frame and then click V-Sel … Vertical Select … to highlight all of the bones in that frame … and then click that Register button in the blue Bone Manipulation area to catch ’em all.
ALSO … as you move bones in a frame and you want to “undo” … just advance the frame counter a click and every not-registered bone snaps back into its old position.
#2 Move a character without bending their legs … You will find that the two Leg IK bones and the Center bone are the main bones that you will use to move your models around the stage. In the Brown bone chart on the far left of the Frames area, Click the +IK to show all of the IK bones. Click on Leg-IK R and Leg-IK L … hold down the Shift key while you do it so that BOTH are selected at the same time. Still holding Shift, click on Center at the top of the list … so now you have the two Leg IK and the Center bone all selected. NOW you can use the Red/Green/Blue rollers in the bottom right of the stage screen to move your character anywhere you want to.
Another way to select the right bones for moving the entire character is to use the BOX-SEL button in that blue Bone Manipulation area. Now you can drag a box around the character to select every bone in the entire model. Be sure to include everything so that no part is outside the box. You know you have done it correctly when you see the Red/Green/Blue rollers light up. Now roll those rollers to scoot your model wherever you want it.
#3 Download another stage or something … Easy! What you are looking for are called MMD Accessories. Search the web for MMD Accessory Download and you will find a bunch of them that people have made available for you to use. You are looking for files that have a “.x” file extension. Look inside the MMD program folder and see the USER folder … inside that is the Accessory folder … put your new items into that folder … note that all of the accessories have that .x file extension.
You can also make your own new accessories … stages … props … using Google SketchUp … Read the articles on my LearnMMD.com site to learn about that.
When you use an accessory, you can attach it to the Ground, to some part of your character, or to a dummy bone, which lets you manipulate the part as if it was another character. Again … Read about dummy bones on LearnMMD.com .
#4 Adding music. There are 2 ways to add music: 1.) “After the fact” by using a movie editing software that lets you blend your video with your separate soundtrack … or 2.) Adding music directly into your MikuMikuDance by going to the FILE menu and clicking Load WAV File. To do that, your music has to be saved in a WAV format … has the file extension “.wav”. You can’t use an mp3 file … it has to be wav. Again … if you don’t have software to convert your music files into a wav format … search the web for some freeware to do it for you. I went through this, myself in October, 2011, and I found a FREE program called AUDACITY 1.3 that I like. ALSO … like with the accessories, people on the web have WAV files that you can download … search LeekSpin Polkka wav or MMD wav music and see what you find. In my DOWNLOAD page on LearnMMD.com I have a link to a page that has the Ieaven Polkka (the LeekSpin Polkka) WAV for free download.
Once you have a wav file, drop that file into your MMD program file … inside the WAVE folder in your USERS folder … so that you and MMD can both find it. Then you have those WAV options in the file menu. Go to LearnMMD.com … to my File Menu write-up and you can read about how to use those options.
#5 Make Ren Walk, not Neru … Easy! You want to use the Range Select windows under the Frame area. Take a look at the walking motion and determine how many frames are used … what’s the last frame with any data in it? Enter that number into the Range-Sel window. Let’s call it 0 – 450 . See that “All Frame” is showing, there, so that when you click Range-Sel all of the frame data will be selected. (Take a look at the other options and see that you can select a range for any one bone or for all of only the facial movements and etc.) Click Range-Sel and see that all of the Diamonds have turned red … they are selected. Now click COPY to put those diamonds into memory. Now you can DELETE Neru and LOAD Ren. Be sure that the frame counter is at Zero because we are going to PASTE the data into the current frame. See Ren snap into the new Frame Zero position. Click PLAY and watch Ren do the walk.
Range Select is a powerful tool that lets you copy all kinds of motions. Following these same steps is how you can save motion data on your own. You use Range-Sel, Click COPY and then go to FILE and click SAVE MOTION DATA … and MMD lets you save that data as a file that you can reload into another character whenever you want. Easy and fun!
There you go! — Reggie
Josh wrote: I found your page while searching the web for help
with MikuMikuDance. Thank you for your page. I just downloaded MikuMikuDance 7.39 and I did not have the missing file error that you write about. My MMD opened and seems to run just fine. Is that a problem??
HI Josh! That is good news that your MMD is running fine. I think the Missing File Error will happen to people, like me, who are running older computers. Have fun with it! Let me know when you Post a Video to YouTube!
KikiKiki wrote: I can’t get my model to talk in time to the music.
Practice … practice!
I am working to make a model “speak” in sync with the Ievan Polkka. No luck yet! One trick to creating a good lip-flapping motion might be to use only one “Mouse” move at a time. I played back the Sample dance frame-by-frame while keeping an eye on the Mouse panel. I advance the frame to a Diamond in the Facial row and then I click through the various Mouse selections to see which ones are activated and by how much. Doing so, I find that only one attribute is activated at a time in that Sample dance.
If you can load your music as a WAV file, you will be able to see the music on the oscilloscope. I find that the view is too complicated to see much more than the beat of the song. Trying to time mouse moves to the music by matching the mouth action to the visual waves on the screen doesn’t look to be possible. You can click “Play WAV with Frame” in the FILE Menu and then you can here the sound made in each frame. Play a short section with PLAY and then click through those frames one at a time and here the tune almost note by note. That may help you to sync the mouth to the music.
One trick I am trying to exploit is the idea of narrowing the PLAY frame range to only the part of the song I am trying to “mouth”. On my Polkka, the Voice starts at frame 500. I set the Play Range as 500 – 550. Then I repeatedly PLAY the animation for just that 50 frames and adjust the mouth settings until I am happy with the result. Then … set the Play range as 550 – 600, and work on just that next little section.
ALSO … I find that when I click PLAY … the animation skips some of the fast movements that I built into it. Almost like a blur, the mouth averages the tight shapes that I registered. I output a test to AVI and played it as a video and it looks like all of my movements ARE in the video. SOOO … what you see on your screen in MMD during PLAY is not as sharp as what you will see after your animation is rendered to AVI. That makes it tough! You just have to register the frames and know they are there, even when you can’t really see them during Play on MMD.
Good luck! … It is all just experience gained through practice.
Crystal wrote: What’s the best way to Render TO AVI? There are so many choices.
Hi Crystal! Thank you for writing! I use the Cinepak Codec by Radius option as my AVI file. If you are planning to edit your video in another program, you should save the AVI as RAW AVI. That creates a huge file that gives your editing program the cleanest images and the best chance for success. I will write more about the video aspect of MMD as I get deeper into it. I have saved your email and I will reply to you when I have a better answer.
SarahP wrote: How can I change the clothes on my models?
Using MMD, alone, you cannot change the clothes on your model. The models are designed as single units. They seem to have fabrics, belts, and chains that could be exchanged for other elements … but the models are actually only one piece. There is now software, just recently available in English, PMD Editor, that let’s you modify your models or even create a new one! Also called PMDE … PMD Editor is getting written-up in the pages of LearnMMD.com. Check it out!
Send Reggie an email to get your questions answered:
I have recently bought a new computer and have created some animations with it. Play back is always good and smooth, but when I attempt to convert the video to .AVI MMD stops always at frame 259 and crashes. I am using a model with low polygons and very few effects. I feel like my computer should be able to handle the render because it is VR compatible. All I am trying to do for the render is get 1070 frames at 60 FPS and screen dimensions at 1980 x 1020.
Are you rendering in AVI RAW, or use a codec? Which one, if so?
I just bought a Kinect V2 and managed to set it up perfectly. Spent 20 minutes jumping around as Miku. Everything was going great until I noticed that the fingers don’t move. It’s just one flat hand that sometimes flops about.
How do I fix this?
Please.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=kinect+finger+tracking
In short: while it’s not *impossible* to do finger tracking in Kinect, it’s not something that works out of the box, and there’s no simple-to-do manuals about it. Trial, error, wash, rinse, repeat. Keep in mind that among the whole LearnMMD team, past and present, there’s exactly *one* person who had any experience with Kinect whatsoever, not to speak of *advanced* stuff, to which category finger tracking definitely belongs.
In other words, you already have pretty fair chance to know more about it than we do. If you manage to do anything valuable with Kinect (even without fingers), by all means, come back and write an article about it.
Hi! I need help with something in Raycast 1.3.0. See when I get a model and such and put raycast on her, the back of her eyes (The eye whites) are dark and in videos with Raycast they’re white and shiny and jsut beautiful so I don’t know what I’m doing wrong… the only tutorial I found was either the glassy eye but they dont have the model in raycast or that they’re using Raycast 1.5.0 which my computer can’t run. I hope I’m not being a noob with this question…
I haven’t seen that hollow-eye issue. I believe that Raycast 1.3 will not be fully available to you unless you are running Win 10 64-bit. I am running old Win XP and Raycast 1.3 and my access to the features is very limited. … I just bought a Win 10 64-bit machine… not installed yet… may have more to tell you after I have played with Raycast on that new machine.
Some models are created with hollow eyes… and when Raycast “does it’s thing” you can see those hollow eyes.
I just bought a Kinect V2 and managed to set it up perfectly. Spent 20 minutes jumping around as Miku. Everything was going great until I noticed that the fingers don’t move. It’s just one flat hand that sometimes flops about.
How do I fix this?
Please.
(o.O) Are you twins?
This is so helpful! Tysm ;w;
Hi ok, I’ve been here before and I need help. I made this new model and I put it in MMD and load the motion. When I click ‘play’ MMD crashes. But when I load a different model, load the motion, and hit ‘play’ it works. Do I need a new version of MMD? ( I don’t know I just thought) or is there something else wrong? Is there anyway I can fix it?
Thanks
Most likely, the problem is with your model. Try to run “File->PMX Info” command, Google Translate its output if necessary, and see what errors it reports. See the tutorial for more details.
Hello,
I have made a short animation on MMD, how do I find out the number of frames it has got. I’m using MMD (ver. 09.31)
You asked me via eMail… so answered you in the email…
Hi! I just want to say that a version of MMD beta for MacOS came out, I don’t think it’s translated into English but I would like to be notified on the page so that those Mac MMers can try out the prototype. By the way, it’s not mine, It’s from しまぴょんさん@夏暑いしがんばらない on BowlRoll. Here is the link: https://bowlroll.net/file/71328
Thank you… When a MacOS bug-free version becomes available in English, that will blow the lid off of the DirectX PC-only world that we know, today. With Apple macs being what they are… that will open a whole new world of MMD, alright!
1. Colored Weights: https://imgur.com/a/bLDncBo
2. Part of Weight Control Panel: https://imgur.com/a/4M2z85O
I’m trying to figure out how the “Colored Weights” work in MMD, I don’t see any specific tutorial for them on this site. I know how to make them light green, and blue, but not Dark Green, which I assume is for moderate weight, or something like that. I strongly believe it might have something to do with the 3rd section of the Weight Control Panel, but I’m honestly not sure.
Any advice you could give me on how the “Colored Weights” work would be great. If you don’t know anything, is there a Japanese site I could translate that might have some answers?
Thanks
I am referring your question via email… please see your email.
Frankly, I don’t imagine what is the practical use for the specific mode (Weight *type* rather than weight itself) you refer to in your screenshot. Perhaps professional 3D artists may appreciate it, though. Still, you’re right that the dark green color is produced in the third section of the weight panel, whose purpose is to share weights between *four* different bones instead of two (blue) or just one (light green). Again, professional 3D artists may get some particularly smooth motions using that functionality, but unless you really know what you’re doing, I’d recommend to stick to more simple modes.
The different colors refer to different “deformation types”, which determine how those vertices move when their bones move/rotate. MMD supports BDEF1, BDEF2, BDEF4, and SDEF, and PMXE additionally supports QDEF. Dark green means that those verts are BDEF4. To make a vert dark green on weight type view, you need to change that vertex to BDEF4 type deformation, and there are a few ways to do that. Check out https://learnmmd.com/http:/learnmmd.com/pmxe-weight-painting/ for more information. I would recommend against using PMXE to make/paint BDEF4 verts, because I’ve found it very frustrating, whereas BDEF4 painting in something like Blender is pretty easy.
As far as usefulness of weight type display, I personally find it useful, but that’s only once you’re using more than just BDEF1 and BDEF2 to deform your vertices, and there’s a lot that can be done using just those two deformation types.
I try to add the pose but when I click the frame button more, the pose goes back to original.
Did you hit Register?
Is it possible to make an AVI loop repetitively in MMD?
I don’t think so.
So I downloaded some models but they seem to be missing the bmps with the texture assets. Figured this out by doing the steps for the Fix Missing Model Textures tute on here; the tex box where the name of the missing texture should be was blank. Idk what to do to fix this or know if there is any way to fix this without straight up replacing the missing textures. I don’t have the skills or the know-how to create replacement texture assets because I’m pretty new to this.
How do you know there *had* to be the texture? Not all models use them. Load the stock Miku, for example – some materials have textures, others are just colored surfaces.
Does the model look wrong when loaded into MMD?
Sorry, didn’t realise you replied so quickly (^^;;;)
I may have used the wrong terminology. I think you’re right, it is flat colour rather than a texture bmp. The models are made by the same person, and most of them have whole sections of colour missing from like their pants or jacket, and in the case of one model, some colours are desaturated. Idk how to fix this though. Another thing to note, all the files have gibberish, which is probably the reason for the problem but idk how to fix this
Ah! Maybe this’ll help.
That worked beautifully, thank you!
I am new and nothing works. I am not a computer wizard. You know what you mean when you say things but I have no related background knowledge. Instructions need to be written so that a dummy like myself can follow the directions and get results. Or else the hobby loses a willing fan . Please help
https://learnmmd.com/http:/learnmmd.com/why-doesnt-mmd-have-a-users-manual/
Usually we’re willing to help a willing fan, but don’t you think you’re *too* demanding? Remember, you get what you pay for.
KB… That link… I just read through that whole article, again… pretty wonderful! … GREAT that you could point a reader to that article… great information is there. Thank you!
— Reggie
MMD’s homemade VMD action importing honeyselect will cause serious deformation.
Er… translate to English, please?
that’s helpful thank you, now when I try to load my character that I made it suddenly crash, at first when I put my character for the first time it’s going fine but then the next time I try it crash
When people are editing models, the number one issue causing crashes are bad physics, and the number two issue is an overloaded display panel. Backup, delete all rigid bodies + joints, delete all display panel entries save the undeletable root (which should contain only a single instance of your root bone), and see if it stops crashing MMD.
First, it’s important to clear “number one” and “number two” separately, so that you know which one of two it is. Bear in mind that the advice above is not for fixing, it’s for diagnostics. Time for fixing will come later, when you pinpoint the reason of crashes.
Also, the reason number three is the bone disorder. Just select every bone one by one in the list and see if anything in their descriptions turns red. If it does, you’ve got a clue.
hey, I really need a bit of help. I when I was trying to input a motion that I download from youtube to the model they disappear. At first I thought I just have to wait but the model didn’t appear. why is that?
What model? What motion? Did you try the same motion with another model and another motion with the same model? MMD does not crash, doesn’t it? And the model is still listed in the model manipulation panel’s list, right? Select its motherbone (or centerbone if there’s no motherbone in it at all) and look what coordinates it gets after applying the motion. Maybe the motion just puts the model too far from your sight and you need to find it.
First thing to check is to look for the “disp” checkbox in the model manipulation panel. This should be checked (it’s something that can get registered to display frame registrations.)
the model might be on different side of the stage