MMD Animation FULL GUIDE & TUTORIAL…
IMPORTANT: This Guide is quite long and can be confusing if you are a visual learner! I suggest watching my video tutorial here!!!
Welcome to a tutorial on how to animate with the free program, MikuMikuDance, or MMD for short…Now, read CAREFULLY this disclaimer…
This program is for WINDOWS PC COMPUTER ONLY! Meaning you canNOT do this on your phone, and you canNOT do this on your tablet!
So, the first step is to load up mmd, to do this you need to download mmd, which you can download the 32bit version here and the 64bit version here and then you load up a PMX model; you can find many mmd/pmx models on deviantart and bowlroll! Or you can just google MMD model download!
To load up a MMD model do NOT click on file>open, instead you want to find model manipulation, which is around the bottom of the program; click on load and load up your pmx model!
Now, animation is a BUNCH of trial and error…the best way to animate is to look at references and use the interpolation curve! The best animators use references, even Disney himself used references when making his animated films!
Now, what I like to do is start my model in a relaxed pose. Which means I take the shoulder bones (or the clavicle) (NOT the shrug bones, if your model has them) and lower them using the Z rotation local axis, not too much, just a small bit because we also need to lower the upper arms, again, using the z rotation axis…now, for the lower arms, or the elbows, you want to bend them slightly on the y axis rotation, NEVER USE Z OR X on the elbows. And for the clavicle, upper arm, and wrist NEVER use the X rotation axis! It will make your model’s arms distorted! And if you look at your own arm, you’ll see that your elbow (or lower arm) only goes one way, which is the Y axis way! What makes it look like it’s going in the Z axis way is actually a muscle in our upper arms! To use this muscle in MMD most models have bones in the arms that have and X on them, THESE bones, you use the X rotation axis! It makes your model’s arms smoother looking, instead of wonky, just pay attention to how your body moves, it’ll come easier with time on how your body moves!
When you also look at your arms, in a relaxed pose, your wrist twist inwards! Use the wrist twist bone (The bone with the X on it, on the lower arm) and twist the wrist inward.
Now when you have one side, just copy and reverse! Then unregister and register the bones! Now just add finger poses! You can do this yourself or download some finger pose packs from deviantart. To load the poses, go to file>load pose data and find where you put your pose data!
Now, for the lower body…your feet turn outward (IF you look at your feet when you stand OR if you look at references, you’ll see that feet turn slightly outwards…to do this on your model, select the ankle IK bone and turn it outwards with the Y rotation axis, the feet WILL become kind of wonky; to fix this find the foot bone (it’s under the IK ankle bone) (Be careful it’s not the D foot bone) and rotate it on the X, Y, or Z axis. This will fix your model’s foot from being too in or too out, it will make it even. And, same thing with the arms, copy the bones and reverse, unregister, register.
Now, when animating, you want to animate what’s in the camera’s view! If your camera is only on the upper body, only animate the upper body, if it’s in full body, and animate every bone, lower body, only animate the lower body…
Interpolation curve!!! Once you register a bone after frame 0, you will use this sometimes! The “x” in the upper right corner is smoothing out the end point of the motion while the “x” in the lower left corner is smoothing out the starting point of the motion. You really don’t want the Xs to touch the box… I have an interpolation curve tutorial here! Showing the many types of interpolation curves!
And that’s basically it! You won’t be a pro overnight, it takes time and getting used to, I know I was awful when I first began animating, or maybe you’ll get it right away and be perfect and amazing at animating with MMD…in any case, check out the video in the beginning, it will help a little more than what I could type out and as always good luck! Bye!!!