Trying to setup eyes

[DesignDawg]

Make your eyes simple spheres, set up to animate, and get the oval shape you want via lattices. Then, when your eyeball rotates, the lattice will eep it stretched the way you want it.

Ricky

[Raptor235]

I tried that allready but when I move the aim object the eye ball goes out of the latice and what ever goes out is no longer influanced by the lattice and it doesn't affect it at all..unless you move the latice...

[DesignDawg]

Can't imagine what you're doing wrong....

Because that's just the way it's done. --Very common.
There is a tutorial out there called "How to set up a cartoon bird" or something like that. It has an eye section that uses the lattice technique.

Ricky

[Raptor235]

Actually I got it to work now thanks for the advice

[DesignDawg]

OK, I found it. I should have looked before I posted... But here it is:

http://users.pandora.be/gds/maya/index.htm

Very useful tut. The eyes part is in the modeling section of the tut, I believe.

I think what you may be doing is not scaling your lattice base? You need to scale it first so it will be large enough to accomodate the eyes when they rotate. But it's very important to let the stretched shape of the eyes be controlled by the lattice.

Ricky

EDIT: OK, I see now that you go it to work. Good. Glad I could help. Sorry if my initial advice was a little "incomplete".

[RIB]

HI all...just a routine check....:bounce:

[GrafOrlok]

I have a nice eye-setup for toon characters:

Create a NURBS sphere and shape it the way you want. Name it "eyeBall".

Create another NURBS sphere and scale it down as this will be the iris. Rotate it 90 degrees in Y, flatten it by scaling it in X and bring it up in front of eyeBall. Name it "iris".

Create a locator and place it in front of both objects.

Now pick the eyeBall object and then the iris object, goto animation menu/constrain/geometry and then /constrain/normal

The iris pops onto the surface of the eyeBall.

Then pick the locator then the iris and then constrain/point.

Now pick the locator and move it around!

Viola! you have an iris that will slide over any misshaped eyeball you can imagine. It's not hyper realistic, but it's very cool for toon character. And you dont have to worry about geometry dropping out of the latice or eyes popping out of their sockets when moving. Plus, you get that extra specular dot in the iris that makes it come alive!

Staffan

[Raptor235]

Thanks Graf Orlok, that is EXACLY what I was looking for the Geometry Constraint I just didn't remember the name and I was looking under deformers!!! thanks again!

[dmcgrath]

My advice is if you want to use a lattice, make the eyeball the shape you want with the lattice, and then select the eyeball and delete its history. The eyeball will stay in that shape and you can simplify your geometry.

[GrafOrlok]

dmcgrath

I think the issue was to make the eye rotate while keeping the (odd) shape of the eye ball. If you delete history/get rid of the latice you won't get that effect. You know what I mean? If you have an oval eye ball and you rotate it in, say X, it will rotate like in the illustration above. You'd want it to stay in place, keeping its shape while you rotate it.
;)
Staffan

[Per-Anders]

so what you want is to not delete the history and set up the aim constraint on the eyeball before you set up the latice deformation?

[playmesumch00ns]

Well really you don't want the eyeball to rotate at all

[dmcgrath]

I think the issue was to make the eye rotate while keeping the (odd) shape of the eye ball. If you delete history/get rid of the latice you won't get that effect. You know what I mean? If you have an oval eye ball and you rotate it in, say X, it will rotate like in the illustration above. You'd want it to stay in place, keeping its shape while you rotate it.
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If you delete the history of the eyeball, with the attached lattice. The lattice will dissapear and the eyeball will have retained it's shape. I thought that is what he wanted. I couldnt imagine why you would want the eye to always bulge forward while JUST the iris moved around on the surface. Wouldnt that make it look really odd during the animation?

[Raptor235]

Hey Graf Orlok, I tried your way but i couldn't get it to work the way I wanted it to have all the layers to rotate, I think you way only works if you want to rotate the iris alone but I also have 3 other geometry objects which are mishaped that have the bulge in front of the iris....I just made them round and it's a lot more simple that way

[GrafOrlok]

What happens if you group all three objects and use the constraint routine on the group instead? Alternative do the constrain on the first object then parent the others to it (and zero out transformation on them)?

dmcgrath quote:
"...the eyeball will have retained it's shape. I thought that is what he wanted. I couldnt imagine why you would want the eye to always bulge forward while JUST the iris moved around on the surface. Wouldnt that make it look really odd during the animation?"

Well, it would look odd on a realistic character but if you want to have, say, a Tex Avery-looking character with eyes popping and changing shape to enhance emotions and stuff, it wouldn't. From what I can make out from Raptor235's pics at the beginning of this thread he wants the eye, which is flat at the front, to rotate, either with the whole eyeball rotating (as it would for real) but keeping the shape, or by moving just the iris over the surface as in cartoons. The problem was that the eyeball pops out of the socket when he rotates it, since the lattice for some reason looses influence over the eyeball.

Let me know if I got it all wrong...

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