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Description
I wanted to see how hard it was for me to get good-enough MMD stuff, now that I know more. And I thought it would be useful to explain what I'm doing here. It's a lot of words. It's not a bunch of pretty pictures.

I start with a .obj mesh by Josh Crockett which I got from Badking.com.au. Great, free meshes are abundant, if you're comfortable editing them.

I reduce the polycount, UV map it, bake a texture, rig and weight it (with the assistance of a borrowed skeleton) in a couple of hours. And that's including the fact that there are still little speed bumps where I have more to learn.

I don't walk you through things. I give you the words that you can look up, to learn how to do it. This is more like, hey, if you work on learning how to do these few things in Blender and PMXE, you can get a usable model out with relatively little work. A usable model is either all that you need, or it's a good start on a better model.

I do this because I didn't used to know enough to do all this. Six months ago, it would take me a long time to do this, maybe days. So I'm writing to help out anybody who's like my past self. Here's what to look for to do it faster. When I say it's easy, I mean, it's easy, once you know how. The hard part is getting to the place where you know how.

There's still tons I don't know. If I do something bad, I sure don't mind anybody letting me know, letting everybody else here know. And there are no guarantees this is the best process.

Edit: If anyone is curious, I redid the high-poly->low poly step. I selected my seams (shiftG with a few seams selected does it fast) and ripped them (v) to preserve the seams through decimation. Decimated with one extra iteration, under 10k verts, better topo, and UV correspondence with the high-poly version, for better baked textures. Nothing is ever the end, it's just the beginning of something new.

Description
I wanted to see how hard it was for me to get good-enough MMD stuff, now that I know more. And I thought it would be useful to explain what I'm doing here. It's a lot of words. It's not a bunch of pretty pictures.

I start with a .obj mesh by Josh Crockett which I got from Badking.com.au. Great, free meshes are abundant, if you're comfortable editing them.

I reduce the polycount, UV map it, bake a texture, rig and weight it (with the assistance of a borrowed skeleton) in a couple of hours. And that's including the fact that there are still little speed bumps where I have more to learn.

I don't walk you through things. I give you the words that you can look up, to learn how to do it. This is more like, hey, if you work on learning how to do these few things in Blender and PMXE, you can get a usable model out with relatively little work. A usable model is either all that you need, or it's a good start on a better model.

I do this because I didn't used to know enough to do all this. Six months ago, it would take me a long time to do this, maybe days. So I'm writing to help out anybody who's like my past self. Here's what to look for to do it faster. When I say it's easy, I mean, it's easy, once you know how. The hard part is getting to the place where you know how.

There's still tons I don't know. If I do something bad, I sure don't mind anybody letting me know, letting everybody else here know. And there are no guarantees this is the best process.

Edit: If anyone is curious, I redid the high-poly->low poly step. I selected my seams (shiftG with a few seams selected does it fast) and ripped them (v) to preserve the seams through decimation. Decimated with one extra iteration, under 10k verts, better topo, and UV correspondence with the high-poly version, for better baked textures. Nothing is ever the end, it's just the beginning of something new.