Now we’re going to delve into setting up bone/frame manipulation of your characters using the Bridge plug-in.

Now if you’re done with the preview, you’ve already made a regular MMD video. But to be able to see your characters dance on a virtual reality set, you still need to build a 360 set using a 3D software.

As you watch the preview of your character and their moves, to your left you can see a menu for bone/frame manipulation. Each little dot is a data point recording your character’s movements. You can drag the slider all the way to the end of the bar at the bottom, and slowly back up to find the frame the last dot is on. In this case it’s frame #9180. This number is useful for setting up your export so remember that.

Find MMD Bridge on your toolbar, choose the third item down, “for c4d.py”, which will export your animation into a Cinema 4D-compatible format (Cinema 4D is a 3D software we will soon be using); then select “execute export”.

Now for the export, you’ll need to set your frame count as 9180, which is also the number of the frame that we saw the last movement in.

Without having to change the frame rate, you can confirm and proceed to render and export your file. Click on “File” and select “render to AVI file”, choose your storage location and set your file name, and don’t forget to set the same number of frames in the settings: 9180 with a rate of 30.

Click “render” and shortly you shall see a small window on your desktop rendering your work. When it’s finished you will see a new folder in your MMD software file bundle named “Out”, click through and you will see all the exported files about this animation produced through Bridge. You can create a new folder to sort your files into it.