MikuMikuDance Music Videos
Pakusukuli created two amazing 'MikuMikuDance' (MMD) videos on Blender Artists.
I’ve wanted to make animations in Blender for a long time, but I don’t have the patience for creating and animating my own characters and long rendertimes have made it difficult to work on animations. Recently the stars aligned when I found out about the MikuMikuDance (MMD) community where people share models and animations and I can focus on doing the camera work and lighting, which I enjoy the most. Additionally, with the denoiser from Blender version 2.79 and the SheepIt render farm creating high quality animations became a breeze.
I’m sorry the videos don’t include English subtitles, but you can read the translated lyrics for Club=Majesty in my post on BlenderArtists: https://blenderartists.org/t/mmd-blender-music-videos-by-pakusukuli/1111564/2?u=sakuukuli and you can get a vague idea of the meaning of Angel Rhythm from this video (from what feels like lyrics translated by Google Translate): https://youtu.be/ffznxW-zRic (you need to enable annotations)
This … is… THE most anime thing I’ve ever seen on BlenderNation (sorry Deadstar).
I’m very curious on how you got these animations and what exactly you had to work with from that community/resource, because the animations are very crisp, but not robotic, the lip sync is good, and they’re 3 1/2 minute pieces – and they all work with each other. Matching the dance moves with the music is also spot on and the various poses all look good.
The draping stuff like the hair, ribbon and shirt are also nice.
I really like the camera work for the first one. It’s a fast swing and the camera is moving and cutting all over the place, but it never misses its mark.
There are thousands of MMD videos on Youtube and many of the videos include links to the models and the animation they used. Most of the animations originate from Niconico, the Japanese equivalent for Youtube, where you’ll find even more MMD videos.
Many of the animations are traced by hand from real dance choreographies (like these two were). The MMD community is a wonderful collaboration of songwriters, dancers, modelers, and animators. Also sometimes adding lip sync is easy because most of the songs are made using the Vocaloid voice synthetization software that can export the lip sync directly.
The animations use a common IK rig in MMD, so you can use any animation on any model. I did fix some clipping issues and overextensions in these animations, though. MMD also includes rigid body physics simulation for the clothing and hair (the shirt was done using cloth in Blender).
I made a custom rig for the camera by combining the methods in these tutorials: https://youtu.be/H7CISQFl7kA and https://youtu.be/Ho2vCdSzDRA and did the camera cuts using the NLA editor (finally found a use for it) to make all the cuts as sharp as possible without any weird easing in between.
Thanks for the information!