Albion(NBU)'s Official MMD thread!

~1 September 2023 (Originally written on 7 August 2023)

Yes, you read that right. The person behind NBU has finally given in to the intrusive thoughts and made this abomination of a thread.

Just kidding! I've been doing MikuMikuDance on an "on-and-off" basis for about two or three years now, and I've already planned to have this thread a long while ago, but never got around to it. Mostly because I'm lazy: P
Which may or may not also explain why I'm still learning the basics of MME(MikuMikuEffect), and everything looks quite rough.

In short, this thread's mostly a blog for me to talk about this hobby of mine, as well as share with everyone my self-made renders, works, updates, and (maybe?) videos. It is an animation software, after all. And it pushes me to keep doing and improving on what I love, instead of constantly wasting time on the 7-year old Xbox, hehe.

This thread is inspired by @Marcus Antonius 's lovely train and plane threads, which you should definitely check out here:

But unlike our dear Ethnon, I don't have an organised upload schedule. Just whenever I get something done that I want to share.

Lastly, NBU has a certain pair of characters that constantly appears in its media. While the other is in construction at the moment, you can still expect to see this lively idiot fairly often:


Anyways, I hope you enjoy this thread as much as I do! And as always, if you've got any comments, questions or suggestions, feel free to drop it into my profile, or this thread itself!

~Cromwell

~10 September 2023

So, recently, I am still seething over the fact that I have missed my chance to purchase a Waifu cup on Gamersupps I actually liked. Mostly because I really vibe with Neon Spacepunk stuff. It’s been a running theme in my NS nation.

To distract myself, I decided to try an anime game on Game Pass that's leaving soon.

SPOILER ALERT: Don’t open the spoiler if you don’t want to be spoiled on the events of Danganronpa V3! Even if the game is almost six years old now…

If you didn't read the spoiler: I liked the main character. So on impulse, I did a quick search of whether her MMD model was available online. Interestingly, it was. Not one, but two models.

And here's how she looks like: (I couldn't get the other one to work, and it showed up as a blank white model. Sorry!)


I have no plans for her model at the moment. Just a quick update on my MMD-related stuff.

And if you want to know what I lost my mind over, here it is. Feel free to judge me, I deserve it.

~ 17 September 2023

Hey, it's Cromwell again.
I was supposed to send out a really long post today, but in the process, I accidentally hit "delete draft" instead of "save draft", and now the whole thing's gone.
While I resist the urge to scream and cry, here's a cute(and really big) photo of Rin.






New post coming soon!

~13 October 2023 (originally written on 22 September 2023, rewritten 30 September, rewritten again on 6 October, copy and pasted from Notes on 12 October.)

Hey, its Cromwell again, this time with something a little different!

So recently, while roaming on Spotify, I discovered that one of my favourite Japanese artists', Utsu-P, had dropped a new album, HAPPYPILLS.

And in his own words: Want a Banger?

I also highly recommend checking out his music and work here! And then condemn me to last place in the next iteration of TNPV for my terrible music taste, haha.

But that's not the main focus of this post!

If you've noticed,
the official album art of HAPPYPILLS features Hatsune Miku, as a drugged-out, gothlike nurse. Which, for some extremely odd reason, I enjoy.

Which brings us to the next question: Is there a similar model for use in MMD?

Well, sort of.

I do have a pair of models, YYB's Hatsune Miku and Kagamine Rin, dressed up as a pair of really adorable nurses:


However, there's one small issue: They look absolutely nothing like Utsu-P's Miku!



And thus, there are three options going forward:

1: Ingest copium (very useful)

2: Pay a professional model maker to model, rig and produce a working MMD model for me.

3. PMXeditor/PMDeditor!


So what is PMXeditor?


To put it simply, it's a completely separate (and optional, albeit extremely useful) software for editing or creating models and materials in MMD, sometimes in conjunction with blender. Just think of it as a character creator of sorts: you can customise your models(e.g clothes, hair etc). Though definitely a lot more complicated than sliding a bunch of bars around.

For starters, you have to download the materials you want to use, mostly from online hosting sites(I use Deviantart and Bowlroll quite often.), or create them yourself.

And from what I've read so far, it may be a little bit tedious or difficult to learn, but once you get the hang of it, a really powerful tool! So hopefully it'll be worth it!

If you're curious, you can read more about it on this wonderful site that I learn stuff from:



And that's all! Just a little side project I'm working on that I wanted to share with the lovely supporters of this thread.



My greatest apologies for the delay! I know I kept you waiting since the last post, so here's a little bonus teaser of a render I'm working on:







Notes: This was originally meant to be the ending quarter of the long post. However, after much deliberation, I have decided to split it off completely and kept the rest for a future post.
This post was delayed thrice because the forum repeatedly lost my saved draft, and copy-pasting from notes tends to lose a bit of the formatting.

~ 20 October 2023

Remember when I talked about MMEffects a few posts ago? Good news! - I've finally figured out the basics of one of the more visually significant ones: RayMMD.

As always, if you want to skip the nerd explainy stuff, don't open the spoiler.

So after a bit of fiddling, I managed to get the Sunlight working! In an indoor stage. I'm really not good at decisions.

And as for the test render...


Anyway, since this month is the spooky month, I’ve got a little bonus planned in the near future, so stay tuned!

~ 31 September 2023

Ha.
Hahaha.
Ahahahahaha!

The person you know as “Cassie” melts away
And in her place, a creature of the night
An identity hidden behind a mask
And poised to strike

I require succulent, crimson blood.
But HIS blood bags no longer appease me.
And my thirst will no longer be denied.

I smell blood, fresh blood.
And Oh my! Its heavenly scent!
It comes from YOU!

Squirm as hard as you like,
But I see naught a reality
where you escape unscathed.


RUN.

~ 30 December 2023



Soon.

New post and update coming out tomorrow: P

~ 31 December 2023
Wa-hey! It’s the last day before 2024, and likely the last post on this thread for this year! So before I continue, I want to wish the wonderful followers of this thread a Happy New Year!



Now, before we get to the important updates on what I’ve been working on for the past few months, it’s time for the grand reveal!:

Bet you never guessed it was your favourite demolitions expert, mhm?

Surprise! It’s none other than The Vickersian Dominion herself! She comes onto this account rather often, so I thought it’ll be fun to have her show up once in a while.

And now onto the exciting part!

So, over the past few months, I’ve decided to dedicate more time and effort to MMD! Time to stop wasting away my precious free time on Destiny anyway, haha.


Real talk for a second, I wasted 1027 hours of my life on this.

So what did I do?
Firstly, I may or may not have sent my email and some other personal details to China and Japan in exchange for some accounts to download stages and models for use. It just didn’t seem right constantly badgering my former Asian roommate to download stuff for me: P

Anyway, here are some of the models I’ve downloaded from a Chinese site by the name of Aplaybox.

Lind(AA-12), holding an…AA-12.

Karenina (Punishing: Gray Raven), holding an M41 SP—big boomstick.

And honestly, it’s worth it! I can’t recommend doing this, though.
Which is more than I can say for what’s coming next. Yep, it’s confession time, haha:

So a few of you may have noticed that Rin has been kicked off (temporarily) from the profile picture, and replaced with someone completely different: An anime-fied version of Centaur-class Aircraft Carrier, HMS Albion:

HMS Albion in 1956.
Sadly, she doesn’t have a dedicated model for MMD. But she does have one on a certain game on steam.

So I paid around £45 for that game, paid an extra £5 for her character card, and downloaded a custom mod and a few other programs to try and bring her to MMD! On top of throwing another 80£ on more merch on AmiAmi.

And so far, I have good news, and bad news. The good news is that if all goes well, I now have a bigger selection of models to work with: not limited to just the ones dedicated for MMD, but for this certain game as well. Which could be really useful, as some characters aren’t available in MMD yet.

The bad news is that I haven’t figured out how to get PMXexporter working yet, and I’m still figuring out the basics of PMXEditor just in case I need to fix her bones.

But in any case, if I do succeed, she’ll appear on this thread very soon!

I’ve also decided to focus a lot more on learning the many different MMEffects available, and I’ll be experimenting a lot more on this thread, so stay tuned!

Speaking of MMEffects, here’s a little bonus render I never got around to releasing, while I was experimenting with AutoLuminous on a different stage:

She returns!

Lastly, I would like to thank the absolutely wonderful followers of this thread, especially @Marcus Antonius , @Neptune and @Sanjurika , as well as @Great Bights Mum and @Lionsmeow for their initial interest in this thread! Your interest really goes a long way in supporting me to do what I love.

And here’s to 2024!

~Cromwell(NBU)

~ 5 January 2023 (I forgot to hit “post” that day)


Conversion to a working model in progress…

~ 9 January 2024

I got sidetracked again…
So here’s a render that I spent way too much time on!


Unfortunately, the combination of the large stage, along with four different models and the skybox, proved too much for my potato of a PC, and MMD crashed shortly afterwards before I was able to add any effects. Sad.

As for Albion, I’m still reading into how to fix her model, since loading her currently-edited Pmx file into MMD immediately crashes the application.

~ 19 February 2024
Kept you waiting, didn't I?
Hello! It's Cromwell again, with some new updates on stuff I've been working on for the past few weeks!

So first off, I have some good news! And some not so fun news.

The good news is: After a lot of troubleshooting in PMXeditor, I finally got a working PMX model of Albion in MMD! Complete with working rigged bones.

And the not so great news is...well...I'll let the image speak for itself:

I admit, I may have gotten a bit too carried away with customising her clothing.

MISSING TEXTURES.

It's unfortunately a very common problem for English MMDers, because our computers can't handle Japanese or Chinese names, and as a result, our filenames end up a bit like this:

And if such a problem occurs with the inner texture png files, that's when white or missing textures pop up. And it's a massive headache, since we usually get some of our more well-made models off creators on foreign, non-english sites, such as Bowlroll (Japanese), or APlaybox(Chinese).

Which is why PMXeditor is so important to master, because we can usually fix common model problems like this (I'll leave the details on how for a future post.)

Well.
Usually.

Which brings us to our next part!

So a few months ago, one of my mates online revealed to me that he too was interested in trying out MMD, so I've set up a little support chat with him in Discord, for all stuff MMD-related, where we share models, effects and help each other fix stuff.

And recently, he found a model online that he wanted converted to a working file for MMD, and sent it to me for fixing in PMXeditor.

Firstly, most model files we use in MMD are in PMX format, but this one's an Obj file, so I had to import it instead of opening it in PMXeditor.

And another thing, there was something else quite...odd.

Go go super small railgun!

For the sake of comparison, here's how big my most-used Rin model is.


It's supposed to be an MMD model of this rather adorable and smug-looking anime girl called Layla from, to quote him directly, "Asian League of Legends".

Very good taste in waifus, but it's still League, so I gotta deduct points. My sincerest apologies.

I'm...not really sure how to go about doing this, for now. Though for starters, I...definitely have to increase her size somehow. In addition to rigging a working skeleton to the model, add facebones, split up the model parts etc etc. It's definitely going to be one of those long-term projects I have going on.

And a quick search yielded no other public model downloads for this one character. So it's really this one or bust.

Which means...more reading and learning for me!

And as always, if I do succeed, you can expect her to show up somewhere in a post in the near future. Besides, I am, too, quite interested in this character.

And that's it for now! Thanks for reading my blog post! Your continued support for this thread keeps me going!

~ 1 April 2024
Oh look! It's the first of April! Happy April Fools'!

But in all seriousness, this post is real. Not an April Fools' joke. I...forgot to plan one for this thread. Sorry.


So recently, I downloaded a new software called blender to try and fix Hikari’s model.
And needless to say:

I've got a long way to go in learning how to use blender.

Layla is being consumed by the cube.

However, with a bunch of online tutorials and some youtube videos, I've made plenty of progress, over the span of a few weeks:


I've managed to fix Layla's miniscule size from last post, as well as freeing her from her cubical prison.

Now, all that's left to do is to add face, hair, body and skirt bones to our dear Hikari!
Which is... easier said than done.

Unfortunately, the other program I use, Mixamo, created by Adobe to help "auto-rig" basic bones for models, was unable to recognise her model when perfectly front-facing, and only worked when I sent the same model but rotated to the right. Which resulted in a imperfect bonerig for her.

I also had to get rid of her signature railgun and little drone, because Mixamo tried to fuse them with her as a complete bone for her arms, and until I find out how to split her acessories from her main model, I'm just going to have to make do with her unarmed.

Which means: More research online!

As always, I'll post significant updates on this project of mine here in the future, and thanks for reading!

~ Cromwell