So I’ve been spending quite a bit of time learning how the PMX Editor works to assemble and edit models for the Miku Miku Moving program.

I’ve also been working through Blender’s online tutorial in the hopes that at some point I can start making my own stuff for this animation program. Many thanks to vasilnatalie/bandages for answering all of my questions and pointing me in the direction of many tutorials, including this one. It’s all been really helpful!

This week I worked on revising the Fairy Goddess model I built for my Ace of Swords themed video for my Chaos Pen writing prompt. I’ve decided to use this program to create renders as Tarot cards because… why not? I’ve always wanted to make my own deck but never felt like I could draw worth beans. With this program, I don’t have to draw anything and still enjoy being artistic.

The first thing I did was use a different base model. Unfortunately, the base I selected is a R-18+ model. Essentially a porn model – and yes, I’ve already seen a few of those videos. I say unfortunate because I have no intention of displaying this model nude and it meant removing the breast physics. Sorry while the jiggle they were given is impressive, breasts don’t bounce around like that when wearing a corset style bodice.

I also spend a large amount of time changing the hair and learning how to rig it and add physics to that. Took me awhile to figure out that if I wanted more natural movement, I needed to add more bones to the individual hair pieces.

This lead me to decide that the physics of the skirt needed to change as well since I didn’t like the way it moved originally. Sadly when I started out, the skirt rigging and physics plugin made no sense to me. So I got the bright idea that I would just rig it myself like I had with the hair. Turns out, adding the rigging and the physics was the easy part. It was getting it all weighted properly that was a pain in the ass. I never did get the results I was looking for on my own.

The Rigging

 

Since I wasn’t able to make that stupid pucker in the front go away completely, I ended up using the plugin, but now after all of my tinkering, the plugin made more sense. I wish the plugin was translated into full English so I would know what everything did, but I finally got the movement I wanted. It helped that I remembered what I had learned with the hair.

After adding a few embellishments and a couple of tweaks here and there, this is the final result:

I’m fairly satisfied with it all. Additionally, while putting all these parts together I’ve learned to be mindful that certain things like physic bodies, joints, and morphs do not merge with the model you are importing into. You’ll end up with a mess and the facial movements stop working due to the duplicate morphs.

The full credits for the model, along with download link for the model, can be found on my DeviantArt page.

And of course since I made the model, I just had to make a video with her. The benefit of doing a “newcomer” vid like this is that I was able to pick up errors and other problems as I went and fixed them before releasing her for download.

The bad part is… I can’t dance. I couldn’t even envision dance moves for her even after I found a song I liked on the copyright free YouTube library. So I decided to do some research on line dancing and settled on the shuffle step.

Apparently with line dancing the only thing that matters is moving your feet to the beat. The rest, what you do while you’re stepping, is either separately choreographed or open for your own style. I guess it depends on the step or the setting? Clearly for videos and stage performances it’s all choreographed so I assume that the personal style bit is for social settings.

Overall, I think the most tedious and time consuming part of the entire project was the posing for the video. And least I thought ahead and saved all my poses so I can use them for another shuffle step line dance if I ever feel the need to.

Who knows, with all this research into dancing maybe eventually all this will sink in and I’ll be able to dance with these two left feet of mine? Yeah right…

I’m also grateful that I don’t tend to get tired of hearing one song over and over again. Perhaps it’s due to the fact I like listening to a fixed set of songs, or even one song, while writing?

So here is my video that demos her movement. I hope you like it!