CGTalk - Need help animating eyeballs

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stzaske

01-29-2003, 10:29 PM

Okay I've model my character using perfectly round eyes. These eyes where stand ins, for more complex eyeballs. Now that I am building the more complex eyeballs, I've run into a problem.

My complex eyes are not round, but rather have a sunken iris, a pupil, and I may even add a transparent cornea (though I'm afraid what that would do for rendering times). All I really want is a way to control\dialate the pupil, and a realistic looking glassy reflection off of the cornea area.

My main problem, now that I have eyes that are NOT perfectly round, is that when the pupils drop below the sightline of my eyelids or cheek, the cheek/eyelid shape fills in the space where my characters CORNEA WOULD BE. So I need to find a way to stop this from happening. I can see only two solutions, but I'n happy to hear your suggestions.

Solutions:
1. Go back to round eyes and create the pupils and Iris using a procedural texture. The problems with this solution is that; a. I'm not sure how/if (maybe using MEL) I can easily animate the the pupils being dialated. The other weakness to this solution is that the reflections in the eyeballs will not be realistic, since real eyes are NOT round.

2. Create some sort of influence object, the shape of a cornea AROUND the eye that influences the face and eyelids. The weakness here? I'm not sure how to accomplish it. Can I just make a completely transparent cornea object?

If anyone knows of an elegant solution for animating relatively complex eyes, I'd be interested in hearing about it.

-=STZ=-

mushroomgod

01-29-2003, 10:37 PM

I'm not sure how/if (maybe using MEL) I can easily animate the the pupils being dialated

one way.....use a ramp shader...use set driver key or.....

theres a script on aliases site that lets you create menus for almost any function inside maya....all you would need to do is make a menu to control one point on the ramp shader and use a slider that would control the size of the pupils (texture based).. then add the menu to your shelf and instant pupils dialation control :thumbsup:

that how i would do it anyway

GrafOrlok

01-31-2003, 08:44 AM

I've been wanting to try that myself. I made a anatomically correct eye before and was thinking of how to make the lid rise where the lens protrudes. I haven't had time to experiment, but wouldn't a spherical sculpt deformer do the job? Just by parenting it to the eyeball...

ReD_MeRkIn

01-31-2003, 10:41 AM

there was a whole thread about eyeballs a few months ago, you should check this out.

Rudity

01-31-2003, 03:45 PM

Ive seen a cool litte trick done with the sculpt deformer.
You could also use clusters , and the sculpt deformer.
ive seen this before and it was cool.

There is a cool way to do this, but its slipped my mind this second.
If I remember ill get back to this thread.

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