/mmd/ - MikuMikuDance

>>416
On the western side? Yes. But the current people left aren't half bad at it, so we get less content but higher quality content on the whole

>>419
Yeah we need high quality content, like [MMD] Defoko x Rei - Magnet

it's been a while since I've watched a MMD PV that isn't from majin, anon. all of the newer MMD videos are either porn dancing videos or genshin impact k-pop dances. deviantart is dead due to AI slop and I don't know where the MMD community is hanging out now.

however as for japan I've seen it's still a thing. some modelers have moved to VRChat, though.

>>426
Not even those are relevant these days. I never see Genshin Impact dance videos anymore and the R-18 stuff / sexdances have been a thing for as long as I've been a MMD user myself. Those are also mostly contained to Iwara and certain Twitter accounts I guess so you're never going to come across them on Youtube (Dekapaiyukari is a king btw).
But yeah it seems Majin is the only relevant MMD creator now. His art style and animation style are both pretty unique and it's something I've never seen done in MMD before so I'm not entirely surprised that he's currently the face of the MMD community.
>some modelers have moved to VRChat, though
This is a thing I noticed as well. A lot of VRChat models in general are directly ripped from MMD.

>>427
>Dekapaiyukari
Ah i see you're a man of culture as well. His models aren't technically nude they just have gigantic tits, and he never animates sex, so his stuff is allowed on Youtube.

>>426
I'm still waiting for the day someone makes a Deviantart alternative that isn't complete ass but I'm sure that even if that were to happen people would stay on Twitter.

>>419
Who's left anyway? I know Majin, i believe he posts here too sometimes, and i discovered Aiden Striker from these threads he's pretty entertaining

I feel like not even people on this board use MMD. The most active thread is literally a Koikatsu thread.

>>438
~~i have it downloaded, does that count~~
the main issue for me i guess is that i just... don't really know what to do with it? maybe i should make a youtube channel to just dump MMD videos

>>438
I use MMD everyday, I just don't post anything because I only make dance videos and that's probably the case for a lot of people.

>>440
Nothing wrong with that. We should probably have a thread for MMD original content

Came across this MMD PV for Static, it's really nostalgic watching it

>>449
been keeping an eye on this guy. his videos are nice. im excited to see them improve

>>438
I use MMD but i'm as skilled as the average deviantart kid who makes Kaito x OC magnet renders. I especially suck at posing.

There's definitely no animators on this board

>>458
Definitely not.

>>459
I wonder who's behind this post

I feel like 2016 is when MMD completely died

The MMD community being basically dead in the west makes me wonder how it's doing in Japan. I would assume that compared to ours, their community is bigger since I still see new models being made for it like that chibi Zundamon, Adachi Rei, etc.

>>541
I am aware that the NSFW side of it is very active though. Iwara is proof of that.

>>542
Why does it not surprise me that the porn community is more active than the sfw one lol

>>543
Not a 3D animator, but even outside of perverted dedication, I have to imagine sex animation is easier than dance animation. Probably easier than writing and framing skits too.

Honestly i was one of those people who in 2014 bitched and moaned about "MMD Vines" because I found them cringy at the time. But 10 or 11 years later I look at them fondly. It was the last time MMD was relevant on the internet. Regardless of how many music videos are made with MMD in the current era you cannot really bring the crowd back. All the old animators have quit, vanished, switched to other software (blender,sfm,koikatsu even) and with mobile users making up the majority of the modern internet many can't even use MMD even if they want to.

tl;dr: its bleak

>>545
i actually like the idea of mmd shorts. i've wanted to organize a project like that for the longest time but this board literally doesn't have animators. it's the 2nd slowest board on the site and it sucks.

I was curious about the state of the MMD community lately, and I think the best way to sum it up is that there's a Sonic x Kpop Demon Hunters dance PV with 26 million views

>>547
i can't even hate this lol this is hilarious

>>547
I'll take this over the borderline elsagate shit we were getting in 2014-2016

>>546
correction: we have a single animator

I think about this a lot and it makes me sad every time

I think it's safe to say MMD is dead in the west but does anybody have any clue if MMD is still popular in other countries? I know that there's still a lot of Japanese R-18 animators on Iwara, lol

It has gotten to a point where I now miss those old MMD Vine parodies. Something I hated back in the day.

>>886
Yeah, i personally never disliked those but it does feel weird knowing they're a relic of the early-mid 2010's. I never thought MMD would ever become as irrelevant as it is today.

>>886
I'm not ashamed to admit that I loved those back in the day. I love the animated shorts formula in general. Sonic shorts was my favorite thing ever as a kid for example.

>>893
>Sonic shorts
damn i loved sonic paradox lol

The way I see it, this isn't specifically an MMD problem. Amateur animation in general has pretty much become extinct. Think about it, recall how in the Flash era of the 2000s and early 2010s the vast majority of 2D animations were either outright sprite rips or consisted of very crude shapes and color choices (EVERYTHING was a gradient!), and just overall simplistic animation. Same for static illustrations, really.
But now? High production value is expected across the board, you have to match or outdo the output of traditional studios to even have a chance to be seen, in no small part thanks to """indie""" studio raising the bar so ridiculously high up. The exact same thing has happened in the 3D animation space. No longer are instant camera cuts, linear-interpolated key transitions, buggy physics, and lack of lighting seen as charming and new, they're seen as cheap and behind the times.
Unfortunately, since we live in times where money trumps over hobbies and principles (some might argue out of necessity due to current world situations) with more and more people, the primary concern is production efficiency. Are you going to be stumbling your way through a 2000s program that looks (and feels to use) like an ancient DCC for Silicon Graphics machines, or are you gonna go with the flow and just embrace now-standard modern tools like Blender, Maya, and similar to get things out quicker and better looking?

>>895
You're not wrong but not everybody's chasing that bag. I think the real reason MMD fell out of relevance is because all the old creators grew up, moved on and the new generations have no interest in learning it (or directly can't because they don't own a pc). I can assure you that the 12 year old girls making Gakupo x Len Magnet in MMD weren't making them expecting money in return and just wanted to see their favorite characters doing funny stuff.

>>896
Oh absolutely, hell that's exactly my point. Financial opportunities didn't even cross people's minds back then, and the few times it did it got mass shamed as e-begging. What I'm saying is that this has flipped around entirely over the years, largely due to destigmatization of said e-begging.
At the same time it was as you say, when we were kids we mashed together our favorite characters in freeware 3D programs and modded games. Today's kids/teens/whatever can either pay some Twitter degen to create their favorite pairings at a dime, or worse kuso them out with generative image models. It's only gonna get worse as the barriers of entry, both technical and financial, keep going up.

>>895
the impression i get is that kids are at least still making amateur 2D stuff (mostly just new era animation memes), its just all saturated in the platform with the lowest average age range, aka TikTok. I think the issue is that there isn't a hot and fresh new kid friendly 3D animation program on the block anymore. 2D is still thriving because theres tons of new and accessible tools for kids to play with, like Alightmotion and Toonsquid.
MMD and SFM had that moment of freshness after their debuts, but now we're past that era of relevancy (reasonably so for programs that havent been updated in decades) and more tools havent really hit the scene since. Blender is technically more accessible than ever but ends up with most people having more of that high quality output you mentioned since using Blender automatically places you in a 'big boy quality' ecosystem where youre expected to take yourself seriously and have higher expectations of your work. I'm certain that if a genuine plug-and-play type of 3D animation app hits the mobile market it will singlehandedly revive 3D animation in amateur spaces.

>>898
Fair point. That "xcrisx gamer" guy on YT does nearly all of his 2D animation on a phone, which still blows my mind, but I can't even imagine how one would create a 3D equivalent to FlipaClip or the software you mentioned. Really, the only part of 3D production that has become so streamlined and accessible is model creation, thanks to VRoid Studio/Mobile and similar programs, but those necessarily impose quite a lot of constraints that result in them only appealing to people who want to make suggestive material or play dress-up.
Even then, that doesn't solve the fundamental challenges of posing, keying, curve tweaking, camera-work, and similar. I've had a taste of ML-powered solutions that assist in mocap, rigging, and key curving. Not only do they leave a lot to be desired, they are anything but accessible due to being online services with recurring payments (god forbid we have standalone products in this age).
MMD won people's hearts because it came out just as reasonably 3D-capable computers had become commonplace, which is to say it ran on literal potatoes from 2001, was completely free of charge, could be operated almost entirely without documentation (!) and came with an okay roster of usable character models and props/accessories that defined a de facto standard skeleton(!!!). That last part gets severely overlooked, many people wouldn't have even used the program for more than 5 minutes if Animasa's character models weren't pack-in inclusions and the user had to scour the net for anything usable.

>>898
>>902
(continuing due to body being too long)
We simply don't have a current day equivalent to this. For all the improvements Blender received starting with 2.80, it still fails to fulfill much of this criteria. The developers are aggressively deprecating GPUs that should be more than perfectly capable of basic 3D work, it's free to use at the cost of being so complex that it's still difficult to use without constant referencing of documentation and online posts, and DOES NOT come with a common roster of models with a standard rig! You could do literally everything else right, but without that last piece of the puzzle you cannot have an open culture of sharing animation+modeling knowledge and resources, because the few people who do open their resources up will do it their own way that is not gonna be interchangeable with anything else. I've had friends who for the most part dug the internet for dance motions to mix with their favorite music, leading them to start experimenting with motion data. We don't have this anymore, and I'm not sure if we ever will again.

Oddly enough MMD still has a niche community of active and talented NSFW animators and modelers at Iwara. Which makes me wonder if there's some site like Iwara but SFW where people post their MMD content. Obviously not in the west. Sadly no one's willing to make a site like that here, but I wouldn't doubt that something like that exists in Japan.

>>903
Honestly... I'm amazed that Blender still doesn't come with preset animation-ready models for people to play around with. I was only able to actually navigate my way around the program for the first time as a kid when I imported a bunch of Nintendo models from TheModelsResource so I could actually play around with rendering, lighting, animation etc without having to jump the hurdle of making a fully fledged model myself. Having a model immediately at your disposal is such an intuitive way to learn that I always recommend beginners to grab something from that site to play around with before I'd ever recommend any donut tutorial.

>>905
Blender has Suzanne and that's it

>>906
funny monke

If Iwara is anything to go by then MMD is alive and well but the community... uhh... i think there'a a bit of an overlap with SFM's.