rigging Cartoony eyes in maya?

[f3rry]

Hi fourlegsgood,

There is a tut for cartoony eyes by wrapping your round eyes to lattice. Find it in learning-maya.com.

I personally dont like that, because the eyes are gonna look bizzare rotating in lattice. I personally like to group my eye and put squash deformer on the group. you still can rotate your eyes around perfectly while doing squash and strech by adjusting you deformer or group them and scale the group up and down

[fourlegsgood]

thanks, I tried the lattice tutorial and works pretty good. I'll try the squash 2 see which i like better. Do you know how to incorporate the lattice into the rest of the face? I have some ideas, but i'm not sure whats best?

[mikesnail]

uuhmm... perhaps, instead of rotating the eyes, you could rotate the texture projection on the eyes? that way you preserve the squash and stretch movement, but still get the illusion of the eyes moving.

[goosh]

We've got a cartoony tutorial up on our site

www.rigging101.com

The basic idea is there..

I hope that helps

Goosh

[fourlegsgood]

Thanks goosh. Thats a good tutorial. Works very well.

[f3rry]

We've got a cartoony tutorial up on our site

I think thats the tut I was reading for cartoony eyes. The problem is the deformation between points in Lattice is linear so if you take a look closer the eyes rotating in funny way, linear in one way and suddenly goes to different direction linearly again. If you wanna go more close up I dont recommend this technique.

To incorporate the whole rig you can setup a blend shape of the head to match the strecth shape of the eyes and SDK them together. I works quite well most of the time. Doesnt matter if you are using lattice or squash deformer. You can parent these eyes to the head joint

I never use texture projection for eyes because you will have to turn "6" to see your eyes which is heavier than "5" mode and there is very limited things you can do with texture eyes.

The overlapping half spheres in the tut can also gets you trouble if you wanna put a bit more details with the texturing. It can produce flickering effect if you gets too close as they sit right on top of each other. I recommend 2 NURBS spheres and SDK the start and end sweep parameter to achieve the same thing.

I hope it helps. More suggestions are welcome.

[fourlegsgood]

I came up with a pretty good way to incorporate the eyes into the rig for my purposes. What I did was created a cluster on the top vertexs of the eye, on the eyebrows, and also the vertexs of the head that are close to these. Then I weighted them to get good results. So now I can sqaush the eyes up or down, squash and rotate, and even scale to get tons of different expressions out of the face with out having to use any blend shapes! I can make him look really angry or suprised ect all with just 2 clusters.

Thanks to the people who have helped me get started.

[f3rry]

Nice one....

Good luck with the rig. We are looking forward to see the final piece....

[Iotrez]

To incorporate the whole rig you can setup a blend shape of the head to match the strecth shape of the eyes and SDK them together. I works quite well most of the time. Doesnt matter if you are using lattice or squash deformer. You can parent these eyes to the head joint

Sounds like a good method .

You say it works quite well most of the time f3rry. Are there any specific situations where this setup doesn't work so well?


For the eyelid would it be any good to use a polygon sphere with a quarter of it deleted, but with the resulting hole covered with polygons. For blinking, copies of the sphere could then be adjusted to create eye shut and eye wide open, which would be linked to the original sphere with blendshape deformer.

You wouldn't then have to worry about gaps between the eyelid and eyeball. Also there would be no issue of flickering caused by the two half poly spheres intersecting.
Thanks.

[Iotrez]

Is it common to have the eyelids part of the head mesh and not seperate spheres?

To do this could you create blendshape targets using the whole head for the blinking, by adjusting the vertices making up the eyelids. And have lattices added to both the eyeballs and the headmesh to get the eye deformation effects?

[f3rry]

To Iotrez:

You say it works quite well most of the time f3rry. Are there any specific situations where this setup doesn't work so well?


Yes, When you are streching the whole head up and still having (or going to do) your eyes squint (evil eyes) - squashed - then you are going to see some distortion

Is it common to have the eyelids part of the head mesh and not seperate spheres?

To do this could you create blendshape targets using the whole head for the blinking, by adjusting the vertices making up the eyelids. And have lattices added to both the eyeballs and the headmesh to get the eye deformation effects?

Depend what u want to do, for cartoony characters just stick the eyelid with the eyeballs. It's easy and does the job. Even pixar still use this.

For realistic character, avoind this. Just looked not real.

With the BD setup for the eyelid, remember that BS works linear, so you could have some overlapping if the eyes are too buldgy.

Creating lattice for the eyes are so common but create jaggy movement when u rotate the eyes around.

[Iotrez]

With the BD setup for the eyelid, remember that BS works linear, so you could have some overlapping if the eyes are too buldgy.

But you can use one or more inbetween targets to get around that.

[f3rry]

I guess so, just too much hassle for me...

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