MMD Tools reads and writes the MikuMikuDance file formats inside Blender — PMX and PMD models, VMD motion, VPD poses. Blender reads none of them natively, and they carry MMD-specific structure no generic exchange format survives: five classes of morph, rigid bodies and joints, sphere and toon textures, bilingual bone names. Without it you rebuild all of that by hand after an FBX round trip, and the shared VMD motion library stays unusable.
What It Does
- Imports PMX and PMD models and exports back to PMX — export is PMX only
- Imports and exports VMD motion and VPD pose files, camera included
- Handles all five PMX morph types — vertex, bone, material, UV and group — with a morph slider panel
- Builds MMD rigid bodies and joints as a Blender rigid body rig, with bake operators
- Converts MMD shader nodes to Principled BSDF and back, manages toon and sphere textures, and translates Japanese bone and morph names
- Rebuilds display frames, fixes bone order and IK links, adds L/R suffixes for mirror editing
Good To Know
- Free and open source under GPL-3.0-or-later, maintained by the MMD & Blender team
- Version 4.5.14, Blender 4.2 LTS and newer, 785 KB; 550,000+ downloads, rated 5.0 from 55 reviews, about fifteen releases in the last year
- Physics will not match MMD, and the maintainers say so. MMD uses an older Bullet with soft constraints, Blender a newer one with hard constraints, so PMX physics cannot be reproduced exactly
- Blender’s IK solver also differs, so imported motion drifts on legs and arms and needs manual correction
- Translate morph names and you lose facial motion. VMD data binds to the original Japanese morph names; bone translation is reversible, morph translation is not
- PMX export keeps only four bone influences per vertex, silently dropping the rest. It also triangulates and splits vertices, so topology does not survive a round trip
- VMD export approximates interpolation curves with extra keyframes; complex bezier handles are lost
- Converting to native Blender materials breaks material morphs, because Principled BSDF has one alpha input and the MMD shader has two
- Rigify support and PMX authoring are explicitly out of scope — use third-party add-ons or PMX Editor
- The add-on’s licence says nothing about the models. Most ship with per-creator terms restricting conversion, redistribution or commercial use
Where It Fits
If you need MMD content in Blender, this is the maintained route and there is no real alternative. It suits people who want Blender’s renderer and camera work over MMD’s, or who are repairing a PMX with mesh tools PMX Editor lacks. It suits far less anyone expecting the result to behave like MMD — physics, IK and interpolation all diverge, and a clean round trip is not something it promises.