ASHKEEEETITTTTTTTTT

also BO2 Kain:

+ close up of the face cause tumblr compression can suck MY D- blood

serbian постал дуд be like:

just wanted to showcase the facials more cause I'm very happy with how they turned out :D I like the eye morphs the most, especially considering the in-game blinking animation is just two planes slapped on top of the eyes like stickers lolll

what's funny is TBC models clearly have enough vertices for a proper blink, but I guess blizz added these shits anyway because it otherwise wouldn't stylistically mesh (ha pun intended) well with the older classic models who don't have that kind of fidelity.

if you wanna try porting your wow model to mmd boy do i have a tutorial 4 you :D

I wanted to make a drawing comparing the slimmer SR Kain with the Defiance model but im BEAT and all I got was this side view study of the booger man so here you go. Since I dunked on Turel's pug profile I might as well do it with Kain too lol

I noticed that the textures for pauldrons and goggles are usually oddly transparent in MMD due to the way WMV exports the textures into TGA rather than PNG, and TGA tends to be a pretty tricky format to work with. To fix this, load up the TGA in Krita (Or Photoshop), right click the first layer and go to Split Alpha > Alpha into Mask.

Once you did that, a second layer should appear. Simply delete it and you're left with a clean texture without that pesky transparency.

After saving it, your model should look much better!

before and after^^ Now let's (FINALLY) start making the physics! For this we'll have to make our own bones and we do this by opening A (Advanced Editor) and going to the BONE tab.

Once you're there, click Start, and where you click - there will be a new bone created! The important things to note here is to line up the bones with the affected area, I'll demonstrate this with the elf's ponytail:

Since the mesh is also low poly, you should only have as much bones it can allow, having more is worthless if you don't have the vertices to rig them to. For the end of the ponytail, you can either make the end an Invisible bone or mess with the Offset settings of the final bone.

Do this step for every part of the model that would benefit from having physics. In this case; I'll also be adding bones for the hair on the front and back. Fortunately the cape and tabard already have bones left from the original rig so we just skip that for the next part when we start making rigid bodies. Once you've made the bones, parent them to the closest bone of the body it's bound to. For the hair, parent the first bone to the Head bone by changing the P-Bone value to the number associated to the Head bone. In this case it's 11.

After you've made the bones, it's time for weighting!

Select the part you're going to weight in the M (Material) tab, in this case the hair: and select the W (Weighting) tab.

Much like in the last part, we're going to select the first bone we'll be weighting the mesh to with Shift + Left Click. One important thing to do is to highlight the whole part you'll be weighting when you select this first bone with the highest value (100), this ensures that when you start weighting the rest of the bones, they will blend in seamlessly.

Now do this with the rest of the bones, highlighting only the area that's affected. At the end it should look like this:

Now that you have the basic outline of the weights, it's time to smooth things out by using these different values:

0 is the lowest value, meaning it won't follow the bone at all while 100 will follow the bone completely, everything in between ensures the transition is smooth between bones. 50 is a nice equal value that appears the same between two bones, so it's good for low poly models that don't have enough vertices for a smooth transition. As you can see from the above gif, a good thing to note is that unbound vertices are black - while blue ones simply have a null value. This is important to know when rigging because the 0 shows it had been connected once to a previous bone, hence why we highlighted everything in red in the first step. This is important so the weights normalize properly, otherwise you're left with vertices being where they shouldn't be. Since every mesh is different, there's no way to explain how to rig each model - you will have to trust your eyes and do a lot of testing through the T (Transform View) tab by moving the bones around and see if it moves seamlessly.

For reference, this is how the finalized rig looked like for the ponytail:

Now it's time to move onto the actual physics!

First we'll have to make rigid bodies for the body itself, these rigid bodies simply follow the bones and ensure that whatever flowy bits won't sink to the floor without having a body to connect to, or phase through something it shouldn't. We do this by selecting only the most rudimentary skeleton, so no arm twist bones, no facial bones, no invisible or movable bones...only the most basic parts like head, neck, shoulders, arms, hand, fingers, torso, lower body, legs and ankles.

After we did that, we go to Edit (E) > Bone (B) > Create Rigid Body - Bone Tracking (B).

Now we've got our basic rigid bodies! To see them, press RB (Rigid Body) in the upper left tab.

While this is great, we'll have to edit them to follow the shape of the body as much as possible so that the physics look good while moving, and much like we edit bones - we do it by messing with the Size/Position setting in the RigidBody tab of the main window. You can also move them around freely in the view window to fit things a little better and make them different shapes! This is the result after I tinkered with it, I also added rigid bodies to the ears cause I forgot it would make sense to have in this model lol - normally models don't have such big ass ears that would smack against things...

Now that we have our basic rigid bodies, we'll be making physics for the flowy parts like the hair, cape and tabard!

Like before, we'll be selecting the bones first - this time only selecting the bones of the hair, tabard and cape. The only difference is that we'll be going to Edit (E) > Bone (B) > Create Rigid Body/Linked Joint (X) this time. This will create rigid bodies as usual, but now we'll have to mess more with the parameters, and linking the joints to the rigid bodies of the basic skeleton we did prior.

What are Joints?

Joints basically function like glue to these rigid bodies. They ensure they are all connected properly and aren't crashing to the floor separately. If one Joint is not linked, MMD will crash, so be careful around this step. To see the Joints, select the J (Joint) in the upper left tab. Before we edit the joints though, we'll edit these new rigid bodies like we did to the body ones, making sure they fit the mesh. The only difference now is that we have the addition of these interesting parameters. The Physics (Physic lol) settings are simple to understand if you paid attention to physics class, here's a little guide if you want to see the settings in action. The only thing that's somewhat confusing is that the Movement and Rotation options actually lower how much the bodies move the higher the value.

The Group settings are for when you have a lot of moving parts and you need some way to categorize them, they don't change any parameters - instead they simply change the color of the rigid bodies on the view window so it's more readable.

These are also important when you want a certain group of physics bodies not to be affected by another group, adjustable by the Non-Collision Group tab. For example, for hair, if you put a bundle of rigid bodies as Group 12, and make them unaffected by G-12 as well- it will ensure the hair doesn't spasm when moving because this is a common problem with movable real time physics in MMD.

Now that we have all our rigid bodies prepped, we'll be going to the Joint tab in the main window. Thankfully, the program itself linked all the other joints for us - and we just have to worry about the first few that are missing their links. Much like the way we parented bones, we'll now be linking these first joints to their respective rigid bodies belonging to the bone they are parented to - in the case of all the hair joints, we link them to the head on Con Body A and then to the hair joint itself on Con Body B. Do this to all the empty joints on the list, only connect the tabard parts to the lower body and the cape to the upper body rigid bodies. With that, we finally have working physics! (If your physics end up spasming, just shrink some of the rigid bodies because they're clashing with each other...and if you see one of your models moving parts drag on the floor, then you didn't link the joint to the correct physics body...it happens.)

Now we can finally work on giving this stoic elf some expressions!

MMD has different types of morphs;

Those that change the material values (specular, ambient, opacity...)

Those that move the vertices (standard for facial morphs)

And those that move the bones (standard for a lot of game models)

First i'll start with the bone morphs for the mouth and brows! Right off the bat, we'll be going to Transform View (T) like last time when we changed the rest pose. I removed my DK's goggles for this one cuz I can't seeeeeeee I'm going with the brow morphs first, so I'll make a Serious expression by moving the elf's pointy brows a little lower by selecting the bones for them and inverting the pose for the other brow. Once that is done, go to Edit (E) > Add Bone Morph (M).

Simply repeat the step for every expression for the brow and mouth! If you want your model to be motion data compatible, you will have to follow a standardized chart so that the program could read your model's expressions from the motion data and you do this by following this resource. TDA is the most used model for a lot of MMD motions, so it had unofficially become THE standard to follow. If your model is unable to do some of them, ie. it doesn't have the parts needed or is too low poly. No worries! Simply make as much as you're able to. Also, much like the way we renamed the bones, we'll also have to rename the facials in their respective JP/ENG tabs to be compatible with motion data. Just follow the names in the description of the link I provided for every expression. Also as a side note, I ended up adding a extra bone for the upper lip, cause otherwise a lot of mouth facials looked weird...

Now it's time to do vertex morphs!

You can still use the built-in PMX vertex morph editor, but I namely use it only for smaller things or when doing fixes. Otherwise I use Blender because it's more precise. To edit your model in Blender. simply go to Import or the mmd_tools tab and go to > Import model. In the import tab, uncheck Rename L/R suffix. I usually disable that cause it can mess with the bones.

Once your model is imported, select the mesh and go to the mmd_tools tab and press Convert Materials for Cycles and then Separate By Materials. Since I have a LOT of parts for my other Belf models, I'll be hiding everything I don't plan to edit with H. Now that he's all cleaned up, go to the triangle on the right side tab, and press + on the Shape Keys portion. This will add a shape key called Basis in the tab.

Like the name suggests; this is the base of the model. Meaning you generally don't touch this unless something goofs up and you need to fix the mesh of the model itself in a way that doesn't mess with the other morphs. Now that we got the Basis key, click + again to make your first morph! You will get a key called Key 1, and you can rename it by double clicking it. Renaming it will make it easier to find in PMX editor later.

Select the shape key by clicking on it once, then select the mesh you're going to edit - in this case it'll be the head. Then go to Edit Mode.

Move the vertices until it looks about right. I made mine a wink, so I can both make a wink and a blink morph out of it by mirroring it. Since my Blender goofs up when it comes to mirroring for some reason (love you Blender), I'll leave the mirroring process for PMX editor. Once you're satisfied with the expressions. unhide everything, select it all with A - then go to the mmd_tools tab and click Export Model.

Uncheck copy textures because we already have all the textures we need lol

Now that the model is loaded back in PMX editor, select all the morphs associated with the eyes and lower the panel to change it to Top Left (Eye). This will sort the morphs in MMD to be easier to find depending on what part the morph is affecting, in this case the eyes. Do this for all the other morphs associated with the mouth, brow and others. To create a Blink morph, I'll select the renamed wink one and select Duplicate (C).

Now that we have a duplicate morph, i'll go to Vertex/UV Morph Edit (E) and then go to the Morph Editor tab, go to Edit > Mirror Edit (M) > Mirror All Edits (A). With this we finally have a full Blink morph!

Do this for all the parts that need mirroring, rename the expressions to that of the link I provided. The only thing left is to do material morphs for the goggles and any part you intend to hide.

Cause I reached the image limit, I'll just have to link a separate tut: How to make a vanish morph<

With that done, your model should be entirely usable in MMD. Of course you can always add to it, but this 3 parter tut pretty much covers the basics. Interestingly, this process is almost the same for nearly every model - so if you find a game rip on the models resource and it has an FBX with bones, you can easily port it to MMD now! Enjoy your rip and happy modelling!