This one is for people that know their way around blender, here is the blend file for the most recent pole dance animation, bear in mind that this animation uses MMD’s arm IK set up and the arms will get twisted as a result, I didn’t want to experiment with Blender’s constrains and mess things up but I will be playing with that in the next few days, I guess replacing the constrains that come with the import add-on with Blender’s internal ones would help with the twist bones but I need to make some tests with that, if you now Blender then maybe you can get it done easy.

MMDTools is required for this to work, you can find the add-on here. 

The file is almost ready for export but not quite, I left it in a state that need a few steps for that but, I left it in a state that would be more friendly to modify, so if you know your way around then maybe you can get it done, but if you want to export it after editing then here is what you should do next.

Select the following bones

Lower Body

Upper Body

Upper Body 2

Neck

Head

Now in the graph editor select all the keyframes for those bones and Key/Density menu and select “Sample keyframes”, this will turn every single frame into a keyframe for those bones, now with all the keyframes selected go into the Key/Interpolation Mode and select Linear, now dis-select the bones.

In the properties panel you’ll notice that the “data” tab is already selected and that the first and second layers are already selected, the first layers contains the main rig with the IK arms and the second one contains the leg bones, the third one contain the regular arm bones, I made it like this to make it easier to select the arm and leg bones for this next step, select both the second and third layers and select the bones that are displayed, they should be the regular arm and leg bones, with those selected, in the 3D viewport since it is already in pose mode, you have to got into the Pose/Animation menu and select “Bake Animation”, in the window that will appear, make sure that the following options are selected.

Only Selected Bones

Visual Keying

Clear Constrains

Override Current Action

Leave everything else as is and press OK, this may take a few moments depending on the power of your computer and Blender may seem to be frozen but give it some time, after the “Bake Animation” window closes, then get out of pose mode and with the armature selected, now you can export to VMD, before you ask, this does not include morph animation, you’d have to add those separately.

Load the VMD file in either MMD or MMD and Delete all keyframes for the IK legs and all keyframes for “OP/IK/Display” since they will no longer be needed, after that, turn off the IK leg bones and register the new “OP/IK/Display”

And that should do it, now if you didn’t do anything in Blender for the twist bones, you’ll notice that the arms don’t have keyframes for the twist bones and thus the arms will twist a lot and look like crap.

There is a solution for that.

For this I use this little program called “VMD Twist-motion Separator”, the download link is called

VMD Twist-motion Separator  V1.20f26 (Neural net版) vmdtms120f26set-learnandtune35.lzh

The Dev has some extra toys in there that you might like too.

This will extract the twist for the arms and make keyframes for the twist bones, but it requires a little set up first, of course you can use it as is but for the best results, you have to tune this for the model that you want to use, in this case Izumi and, well, the twist bones for the model have to be set up and working correctly to begin with, Izumi has no issues with that though.

First download the program and extract the archive, look for a file called modsetup.ini and open it with the note pad or program of your choice, now the first line should look like this:

-AI -WTE -ATE

Add // to the beginning of that like to comment it out and disabling this two operations that I honestly think do not work that well, the like should look like this.

// -AI -WTE -ATE

Save this ini file and close it, this modification will work in all animation you will work with, now for the tuning.

All you have to do to tune for Izumi for example, is grab your model’s .pmx file and drag and drop it on top of the file called “learningposePMX.exe”, and that is it, the program is tuned for Izumi, this used to be a bit more tedious and you can still do it the old way but you don’t have to.

Now that this program is tuned, in MMD or MMM save all the keyframes for the arms in a VMD file, all six bones, Shoulder, Arm, Elbow and Wrist, and only the keyframes for those, this will make the conversion quicker, now grab that VMD and drag and drop it on top of the file called “VmdTms.exe”, this will give you a new file with same name but with this added to it “-cnv”

If the files was called “arms.vmd” the new file will be called “arms-cnv.vmd”, all there is left to do is go to MMD or MMD and replace the old arm keyframes for the ones in this new file, once that is done, select all the new arm key frames for the 10 bones and set the interpolation to flat, this is because the programs applies interpolation curves to the new keyframes but in this case since every frame has a keyframe, this is not necessary, it in fact make everything look like crap if you render a video that is over 30 fps, so you have set them to flat or no interpolation, and you are done.

This is the method I’ve been using so far but it will be made obsolete once I start getting a better grasp on how to do it better in Blender, so enjoy the info.

The link for the new reward will be arriving to the Dms of $20 tier supporters and up ASAP.