おつ

So, I just recently found out that the creator of MikuMikuDance is finally letting it rest. Last May, Yuu Higuchi announced that he would no longer be updating MMD. Guy's gotta move on sometime, right?

http://vocaloid.blog120.fc2.com/blog-entry-8723.html

Been a great ride so far, hasn't it? Well, looks like a new model format's come out called PMX to replace the aging and ailing PMD that everyone's been using. I guess we can wait and see what comes of that.

In the meantime, it's not really too hard to figure out what the Kinect is - it's a depth camera, and only senses depth. So, it will see all of you as roughly being the same distance away, and then I think it applies some image recognition algorithm to figure out what looks like a human. So you can totally mess with it by like... holding stuff in your hands, or in my case, putting one limb behind your back.

Spinning backhands? Reverse roundhouse kicks? Yeah, they'll need some touching up after you record them. And since the Kinect senses only depth, it can't pick up rotation of the arm or leg, rendering all your side kicks as weird, knee-killing crescent kicks. I'm finding high kicks to be clunky too, since I guess OpenNI doesn't like it when your leg gets higher than your torso.

Did I mention it can't really track sudden motion that well? Try doing a reverse spinning roundhouse kick in slow motion. It sucks. I recommend using a wall.

And for the record, I don't recommend recording drop kicks, OpenNI won't pick it up (at least not easily). But if you wanna try, roll a futon or something underneath you. Trust me on this.

I'm personally finding MMD to be a little clunky too, but that might be because I can't find an option to keyframe an entire frame as of now. This means my original plan of recording a bunch of animations in the same go, then splitting them out kinda didn't work. Each one's gotta be done individually.

Apparently, tutorials for VMD editing are pretty well hidden on the 'net. I haven't been able to find much, but I guess I'll just have to learn the hard way. At the very least, that's low priority for me right now.