Beatmap Listing » halyosy - Snowman

The first half of the video was recorded from project mirai

second (mmd) half:
Accessory:
snowman stage (night) - WildStudio, SEGA
Road Roller - Momonga

Effects:
Diffusion - Sobaro
PostRimLighting - mfakane
Round Snow - Spakaford1

Models:
Project Mirai Snowman KAITO - SteelDollS, PriChama, SEGA
TDA Diamond Dust KAITO - Jjinomu
TDA Ice Fog LEN - Jjinomu

Motion:
Camera - dorothy3242
Night of Fire dance - TN

The song was amazing, the idea was born, the mapset came later

One of the first steps towards this map's existence (besides, uhm, mapping it). I remembered from my years ago on MMD, that this specific song Night of Fire had a motion data (basically, you can load it and make any model perform that exact dance without needing to reanimate it yourself.) So I had this great idea, why not make a video for it? Get a mmd model of the chibi snowman kaito from mirai, use the TDA models of him and len, and have them dance!

Except this ended up really difficult. I had to find a good quality video of snowman from project mirai. I also had to find the correct stage, also.. also.. the said motion data I remembered existing from the past? It turned out to be really hard to find. Had to go through lots of old youtube videos, nico videos, to find a working link, and even then it wouldn't sync by default with the song, so I had to figure out what part of the dance went with what we had in our mix.


I also don't know how to animate, those brief 2 seconds where chibi snowman kaito meets the full-grown len and then transforms into a full grown kaito were animated by me.
Yes also the part where len drives in on a road roller.
I also did the camera motions for the entire thing, and added fitting expressions to len and kaito to make them look like they were having a good time! Also added effects to make it look prettier~

Doing all of this was my first time using MMD in years, as such, I had basically no idea what I was doing ^^;

Despite the challenges, that went ok.

EXCEPT THEN I COULDN'T FIGURE OUT HOW TO RENDER THE MMD VIDEO. MMD HAS SO MANY SETTINGS FOR AVI FORMATS TO SAVE TO, I COULDN'T FIGURE OUT WHICH TO USE D:. So instead of using mmd to do that, I recorded my screen while playing it back, then tried to edit the pieces together using avidemux. Because I don't own or have an actual video editor. Please don't use avidemux for things like this, keep it to basic edits, please, it won't work well.

So then I had to install a trial of adobe premiere just to make this, and whew, eventually, it was finally done.

I think making the video took just as long as making my difficulties? whoops.

but after all the effort put into making this epic video, ran into a new problem.
The taiko playfield would cover most of it! So I couldn't use it there!

So instead, for the taiko difficulties, I made a storyboard. I drew the snowmen myself, and did a lot of experimenting to make it to where they'd react to how well you play the map. Miss a note, they'll stop dancing and look sad. Hit a finish, and they'll jump for joy! Making that was really fun. osu! needs more gameplay-influenced storyboards, and this one is basically an experiment seeing how it works.

The first snowman, the one in the middle, is basically the snowman in the background image.
The second snowman, the one on the right, is the snowman from the snowman video from project mirai. So basically it's the kaito snowman.
The third one, the one on the left, is my own snowman design and is supposed to be Len. It was hard to resist temptation to put a banana on his head.

Like they're basically partying together in the second half, it's neat!


In conclusion, this mapset is really, really dumb, but it has a lot of love put into it, cheesy video and storyboard and all.
At the same time, I refuse to acknowledge this exists, it's so dumb, I'm supposed to be a serious mapper, everything else I make is serious.
but, even though it's silly, it's still a result of as much effort as I could muster

It really felt like when I was making this, that wow, a ton of skills I've built up throughout the years are being put towards this. It was a strange and really fulfilling feeling, you really never know when your old hobbies and knowledge from those will come in handy again.


thanks for reading my story~ ?