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 accidentally pressed full screen
when I return it, the display becomes big like this
this display is too big for me
make the writing so small that it’s hard for me to read
how to be small again
Hello… That’s a new one. Have you tried anything… restart computer… adjust monitor settings… download a fresh MMD?
I was able to successfully convert and import this AVI file for my MMD animation into MMD itself, however once I started to play back the animation, the background kept glitching and flashing like a strobe light. Was there something that went wrong with it? I’m not sure what to do.
How do I download polygon movie maker? Every time I try It doesnt work and I tried a different way and I got a notification that a threat has been found, sorry to bother
Are you speaking about downloading MikuMikuDance? The download we offer is clean and will give you no problems. I have heard that AVAST will sometimes see the MMD download as a threat. … but our download is safe. Hundreds of new users download it every week.
You can also download the MMD software directly from it’s Japanese page if you wish. What they call 1.3 is the 32-bit download and the 1.4 is the 64-bit.
hey,did u see my text?
I guess not… sorry… what’s happening?
— Reggie
hey,do you know how i press the split in the masking tool because i was trying to add a eye color texture to my character and when i pressed on the keyboardon the right,the split button was grayed out,can you fix it please?
Hi! I would like to know how to anchor a camera and follow a bone
When I attach a follow bone to the camera, the camera moves along with the model as well. What I’d like to achieve is for the camera to stay still and only rotating to aim at the bone.
Thank you!
It’s not clear what you expect to achieve. When you attach the camera to a bone, it follows every bone’s move, that’s how it works. If you want it to move in a specific way, you must think of a way to produce a bone or a system of bones that move in that way.
Sorry, what I meant was a camera like a CCTV camera instead of a selfie stick kind of camera
You may try this tutorial: https://learnmmd.com/http:/learnmmd.com/better-mmd-followcam/ While it may contain not exactly what you seek, at least you can get the idea what kind of technique will be necessary.
Hello! I got stuck while i was following the “Raycast MMD MME (shader effect i think)” tutorial
I was doing fine until i reached the part: “When you load the main.fx it will look horrible!… and that’s why we MUST load ray.x in the main Raycast folder.”
I loaded ray.x and the model when from being dark with white spot to regaining all the corresponding colors but the white spots remained, like the model is covered my bright snow.
I while describ the step i did because probably i missed one step or did something wrong
(I’m using Raycast 1.5.2)
There i got stuck, what did i miss??
Sorry for the lenght comment but i wanted to be properly explain the problem
That’s a nice, clear description of the problem. But… I have never before seen that issue of the white spots. I have no answer for you. Have you tried more than one model?… do all models have that issue? Have you followed the steps in THIS Ray-MMD tutorial?
I think i was able to fix it.
I followed another guide that also was here( and discovered that i had to load the ray.x file using the ACCESORY panel…not dragging the file into mmd).
And was able to reduce greatly the white spots, a few small white spot remained in the hair and face but i think that’s the extend i can do with that certain model or maybe it can be reduce more but i haven’t found the way yet.
(I said that because already saw the model in other web without the spots)
Thx for answering Reggie-Dentmore!
Awesome… great that you made some forward progress!
i tried loading a avi file for background but it says that the avi file can,t be loaded,can you tell me the right way of loading it or is there any.
by thw way i converted the avi file using this website https://cloudconvert.com/mp4-to-avi
:)
I followed your link and used that Converter. I chose one of my Mp4 videos, and, before clicking the CONVERT button, I adjusted the settings… Tune: Animation … Profile: Baseline. … My downloaded AVI worked in MMD!
— Reggie
I tried another one adjusting only Profile to Baseline… and it worked in MMD. I did not get any audio but for an MMD background, we don’t need sound.
How can i take a HD screenshot of the characters while this are dancing?
I can’t use the option “render to picture file”
Why not? What happens when you try?
When the characters are dancing (using the motion file and clicking the button “play” )
I can’t use that option, to take a SS of their current position,nothing happens, can i pose them or stop the motion in the part i want?
The software Irfanview can caspture a single frame from a video… will that work in your situation?
Can you not scroll through the frames in MMD and stop on the frame you want to capture… and then Render to Picture?
I don’t know how to do the scroll through the frames in MMD, maybe i could use that
The point is, you don’t screenshot MMD while the animation is *playing*. You just select a still frame at the moment you need, and then select render to picture.
Scroll through the frames… See the Step-by-Step instructions page… ?
Thanks alot! Finally did it double clicking the frame! thx
MMD x64 DL link is offline :(
All fixed… Sorry about that! … Hosting service error… but all is good, again. Thank you for the message!
— Reggie
questions regarding hardware. what is most important for fx and multiple characters when creating scenes?
if one plans to move on to create and render via Blender. how do the hardware needs change?
In PMXEditor, i have a morph that resize some object. But that object has bones in some parts that aren’t being scaled along with the vertex when i test the morph.
How can i make a morph that move the vertex and the bones at the same time?
Basically, you can’t. There’s such a thing as bone morph, but it depends on setting coordinates for each bone individually, you can’t just set it to “expand everything from XYZ to 10%”. You can
also expand the whole model manually (along with bones) and save it under a new name, but not change the size dynamically.
If i resize the whole mode manually, what is the morph that i have to create after with that change? So it take the bone and vertex modification.
Again, it *won’t* be a morph, just a model of bigger proportions.
How to resize PMD models (and what to do when they don’t)
hi i am having a major issue with a model that doesn’t want to load – appear in mmd at all, it just legit shows a blank space when i ‘load’ the model up.
i even tried to load the model up on pmx editor but it doesn’t work, tells me an error that is implying that i don’t have the spah,tex -etc not inside the folder like it doesn’t exist when it does T_T….
i have screenshots; – please help me.
Hello! … I forwraded your question to our Mae Blythe… She responded:
Flying flipper doodle! I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a file path that long! I copied the file path for the model and plopped it into a new tweet to see how long it exactly was. Too long to tweet!
Generally, file paths are limited to around 260 characters. Shortening the file path should fix it. I don’t think that it’s an issue of too many sub folders – even though 13 seems a little excessive, but it’s an issue with the lengths of the names.
The user added \\?\ before the file path, which allows Windows itself to handle a file path up to around 32k characters, but MMD and PMXEditor probably were written to only accept file paths smaller than MAX_PATH.
I learned a lot figuring out the answer :D ! Thank you for sending the question my way!
– Mae
Ah okay so basically delete the folder this file is in that is making it too long to than keep it inside the files where the model is located at? I hope I am getting this right >-<
Edit; I forgot, I tried that before by loading the model in where I placed the downloaded files at and it still wouldn’t work, it wouldn’t even load at all; for example I extracted the files in the root of my music file folder where I keep my music at usually anything i download from mmd onto there just extracting it and loading it onto mmd works but these files won’t load for crap x..x like not kidding here.
I myself trying researching up this problem and the only thing that comes close to the issue i am having here is this tutorial made by an mmder on a journal but i don’t get how to do the tutorial for the bit that I am having issues with – look https://www.deviantart.com/riveda1972/art/MMD-How-to-fix-invalid-or-corrupted-models-4-764881333 if you scroll to #4 tutorial that’s where I don’t understand how to even do what he suggested which i did try to do it but failed model still won’t load up @-@.
The other odd thing is that the person who gave me these files, they used to work on my mmd but that was when i was using my laptop if my memory serves me well, I ended up deciding to moving every file i got to my flash drive my sibling let me keep but I don’t think i got the original downloaded files for these files; anyway the odd thing is that i do remmeber opening them up on mmd and them working fine, fast forward to me thinking i don’t don’t the files on my new laptop; when I am about to download them on my other account since the one i requested such files in got taken down; I had a network error when i was downloading the files in my main profile on the website – they uploaded the files in a stash so i have no issues downloading files from stashes, – it’s just this one file out of the blue kept giving me ‘network error’ I assumed it was my internet since it has been acting up but it wasn’t so I gave up retried again by not clicking the stash to download it rather the download button to the right side, and the files downloaded that’s when this issue started to occur; I was at lost on what to do so I deleted the file I had downloaded re-downloaded to only get the same issues doesn’t let me edit the pmx files names nor loading, I then did it again to downloading not from the ‘download’ button on the right coroner of the stash but rather the stash button to download the files, funny enough it worked – i assumed maybe that was the issue causing this problem but nope..
So yeah..thats what really went on T-T I don’t know if I even own the original downloaded files i did when this person gave me the mmd clothing, accessories they did for me on da sadly. I wanna try and look for it cause maybe the files were always corrupted in the download section? Or idk..cause I have 0 problem downloading them now with my other account..2/2
second edit update; so it works now….I have 0 clue what in the world is going on but last time like i stated put it in the root of music folder for it to not work but now it loads everything well except when I put it inside the files where i need them to be at – so thanks to your helpful advise i will do what you told me once again :3! Just gonna shortened all my files up like you told me – thank you so much again – oh and sorry for the spam.
Wow… THAT’s an intense write-up! I’m surprised the Spam Filter let it through! … GREAT that your model is now working!
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Amazing…
— Reggie
I’m new to MMD. Mind if you show how?/Where may I learn?
We have step-by-step instructions… give it a try!
Why do some models have their eyes turn white after loading a motion? Before the motion, their eyes seem fine
Maybe that motion data has moved the eye-bones or the eye-morph sliders to some position that doesn’t work for your model. … can you go in and edit that new motion so that you can see the eyes?
I’m new to MMD. Mind if you show how?/Where may I learn?
will MMD work on a windows 98??
Windows 98… I doubt it. You might try the earliest DirectX version of MikuMikuDance: MMD 7.39 from the year 2010. … but… I doubt it. Please try it out and check-back to leave me a note about how it goes.
— Reggie