Oppa, do you trust me - Progress - Sample DL
Ok guys, it’s been a bit over a month since I started animating in Blender, I gotta say, the experience has been good so far, I can pretty much do whatever I could do in MMM before and more, even though I haven even started using Blender’s tools for animation other than the “tweening” tools, I haven even whipped out my plug ins, the process of animation is going much faster than MMM, not to mention MMD.
Just yesterday I hit the 30% mark, approximately, I am 1720-1780(x4) frames into the animation, out of 6200(x4), which means that if the dance were just for one model I would be done already, which is remarkable given that my longest dance (I think) Girls Day – Expectation with a little over 5700 frames, took me around 3 months to complete.
Not to mention, when I started this dance on MMM, I had barely animated the arms, almost nothing for the fingers and there was no interpolation for anything, in blender, the only thing I am not animating so far is the face, the animation for the body, every part, is already interpolated and smooth, I had to take some days of to tweak and tighten Izumi’s rig, and I am confident that it doesn’t need any more adjustments, at least for the mechanisms that it currently has, I won’t mention future additions since I think it can perform nicely as is, but will see, the next time I update her is gonna be whenever the MMDTools pulg-in for Blender is updated to work with Blender 4, the rig can benefit from more layers for the Rig UI, supporters from the $30 tier can download her rig and see for themselves, there is also a “bone layers” plug in in that folder that is used to show the rig UI, it is a free add on btw, but since the official download has been updated for Blender 4, I provide a Blender 3 download just in case, so I recommend installing that add on in case you want to play with Izumi’s rig for blender, I’ve been updating those blend files constantly so if you already have it, it doesn’t hurt to get a fresh copy.
I include a small free sample of the motion so far just to proof to you that my rig works and the export process works flawlessly, the dance as is should work in any model without modifications, but the difference in body proportions will make it look different as usual, the dance doesn’t use IK controls for the legs but I can just as easily prepare a version that does use IK controls, also take into account that the motion will be rather heavy on the amount of key frames, so far I just focused on decimating the key frames for the fingers since those don’t need interpolation that much, so in case the final dance goes over MMD’s limit (which I doubt), I can make an effort to reduce other areas, prime targets would be the center bone as well as twist bones, but time will tell.
Anyway here is the download for the
sample as well as the video showing off the progress for all 4 models, let me know what you think in the comments.