Have you ever wanted to make those videos you see on Youtube and NicoNicoDouga about dancing 3D Vocaloids, Touhou, Utau, Idolm@sters and many more? I introduce to you MikuMikuDance, it is a software that enables you to import 3D model files in PMD format and lets you control movements and and camera sequences easy and simple. You can also lip-sync the characters to any song that you use for your video manually or by using the VSQ file from the Vocaloid software.

For those who would like to test out this great software, you need to download the software first. Links are provided on the end of the article.

Using the software is easy, but of course at first everything looks very confusing, but after an hour or more of fiddling with the program, you would be able to familiarize all the tools in the program.

A comprehensive video tutorial on the usage is embedded below.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Get the Main Software here (English, Japanese).

You can find most Motion Files, Models and Accessories here.

Other resource links:

Anomaro
Azu’s MMD Warehouse
Atwiki
Meijesbeeld
Hankyou

The model I used in my First MMD Hakurei Reimu Test can be obtained from here, the mp3 is here, and the motion file here.

My first test of MikuMikuDance with Hakurei Reimu model and static JPEG Background. No dynamic camera angles, no lighting effects, just plain model and motion test for future productions. The background of the video is only a picture I took from my desk, I just estimated the angle for the 3d video.

It seems that it’s not that hard to use MikuMikuDance, the only problem is that it takes a lot of time to do a single pose for every second. But thanks to tweening, most of the frames have calculated measurements of the position of the pose. So for example you raise the arm up from frame 1, and you raise down the arm in frame 10, what would happen is that the program would calculate a movement between frame 1 to 10 so that you would not manually set every pose on every frame.

One of my first few issues with this is that there are no other codecs and compressors installed for saving the Video, when I first saved the AVI file, the two minutes of the video is worth 768 megabytes! So I had to compress it first before uploading to Youtube since my upload speed is slow. Before that, I had to mux the mp3 file with Virtual Dub so that it would have music.

But anyway, just watch the test video below and enjoy…

Click here to view the embedded video.

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