How do I rig cartoon oval eyes?

[JoeCosman]

The simplest way to do oval eyes is to parent your spherical eyeball and eyelids to a bone that scales up on one axis. all children will distort appropriately.

when you get into differently shaped eyes, you can use metaEffectors and the Xform effect.
apply Xform first in the list, then your skeleton. set the skeleton to "use predeformed points"
and set Xform to be Dynamic. translating Xform will give you a Distortion field that the eye object can move through, sort of like a deform lattice.

hope this helps.

-Joe Cosman

[PauHana]

Hi Joe,

How would you solve the areas surrounding the eye like the eyesockets & eyebrows?

[JoeCosman]

The first method would involve modeling the eybrows already scaled, and then scaling the eyes to meet it inside messiah.

the second method would include overlapping the metaEffector field to include the eyebrows.

-JoeCosman

[PauHana]

Thank you! I'll try doing some tests this weekend. If I come up with anything worthwhile I'll post for advice from others...

[Julez4001]

Kinda busy my self....

so i will be watching this thread to see what the results will be.
the xform sounds promising....

[Nervio Optico]

Thanks Joe:
It works, in future I´ll send pics of my character, and if posible some animation.

[PauHana]

Nervio Optico,
Can you post a quick movie of the eye deforming and how the area around it is affected? I did a little experimenting this weekend but wasn't happy with the results

[maks]

when you get into differently shaped eyes, you can use metaEffectors and the Xform effect.
apply Xform first in the list, then your skeleton. set the skeleton to "use predeformed points"
and set Xform to be Dynamic. translating Xform will give you a Distortion field that the eye object can move through, sort of like a deform lattice.


Hi Joe, would you mind putting together a little example scene for your "deform lattice" using Xform? I don't quite get what you do here.

Thanks. :)

[Julez4001]

I've uploaded a ToonyEye project
Using Joe's first suggest on parenting to a boneand it works fine for me.
Just use the armature for pitch control.
Just somehting I wipe up for R&D as I goingto need this this week.


The Xform was pleaseantly fun but I could get it to what I want.
Weight Transformations checked gave better results but ultimately option 1
was simpler and had more control.

If anyone want me to make a video out of this let me know!


http://www.flarenova.com/tooneyes.mpj

[maks]

I'd still be interested in Joe's XForm setup. I tried it following his steps, and it didn't do what I expected at all...

[Suricate]

In the animation I did here (http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?t=195948) I used a setup with oval eyes in combination with morph targets. This was a setup that was described in Jonny Gordon's 'Cartoon Character Creation' for LW, but obviously it is also applicable in messiah. The main idea is to parent the eyeball (which is a sphere in its original shape) to a null 'L_Eye_Scale'. This null is scaled to deform the eyeball. Then 'L_Eye_Scale' is parented to a bone 'L_Eye_Stretch', which influences the eye socket around the eye. If you stretch the 'L_Eye_Stretch' bone, both the eye socket (including any morphs) and the eyeball will stretch.

[maks]

Yeah, that's the classic method as I use it all the time for cartoon eyes, works great :) But have you played with Xform by chance? I haven't used Xform at all until now, and I'm still a bit unclear on how to use it. Lack of examples out there...

[Julez4001]

yeahi was going to do it "Johnny" style myself but ended up with just plain null parent bone. Course you can't to the squash and stretch or "the heavybotton but pointed top shaped eyes.
http://www.jawa9000.com/technical/eyes/eyes.htm#part7


Xform seems to have potential of accomplishing that but its weird because I always feel like the chicken before the egg when trying to use it. Bloat seems like its cousin in this aspecta s well.
Some visual ques would help

[Suricate]

Ok, I put together a simple test of the Xform effect. I hope I understood what Joe thought of (actually, in my scene the Xform effect comes after the bones effect). It seems to me that this idea seems to have some great potential. :)

[maks]

Cool! I have a much better idea now, I must have been doing something wrong when I tried it. Thanks Suricate :)

[Nervio Optico]

Hello:
I been try a lot to find what Joe Cosman say, but I cant do it, and when I try to open the project that some body sended, Messiah shows me error, meave because I just use Messiah Animate. Please help.
Thanks.

[Nervio Optico]

Is somebody there. I tryed, but cant do it.

[Julez4001]

No. I haven't tried it. This will probably show up in his tutorial CD.

Right now use the lightwave tutorial to mimic their findings on the Newtek site.

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