Hey there folks.
I am an animator/art director working on a small microbudget animated short film. I have a character with a certain eye design and apparently rigging her eyes is much more complex than I thought it would be (I am not a rigger and struggle with it mightily, using as many free scripts and tutorials as I possibly can and praying it all works out).
This image will help if the description doesn’t make sense: http://i.imgur.com/f3KUmUG.png
As you can see her eyes have a distinct cartoony look. Her pupils’ position has been the trickiest for me. Normally with non spherical eyes you’d simply stick a sphere in there and use a lattice to fit the sphere to your liking. For this mesh, she has no eye socket topology.
The eyelids are nurbs spheres and they are relatively easy to set up. But her pupils’ resting position is close to the center of her face. I have tried the spherical method for her eyes following a great tutorial on youtube (https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=AwvNHHIVd-A). Unfortunately this method relies on keeping the pupils smack in the center of your spherical eye. Placing it anywhere else makes the pupil collapse and clip and it looks awful. So I decided to forego the sphere and use a flattish disc geometry and stick a pupil on top.
I can set up the eyelids and the controls for that. My aim is to wrap the eyelids around the eye as you see in the pic, then wire the pupil to slide along the surface of the eye using constraints or maybe follicles or something, because then I could add blendshapes to the pupil or maybe other things (like some kind of switcher to change the pupil into various shapes like stars, spirals etc). I am just having trouble with the wiring hierarchy as I am using a free autorigging script.
Basically my issue is figuring out a setup that lets me keep the flat 2d cartoony style with the pupil placement and be able to wire it all together so I can scale/move it etc without double transforms.
Should I redo her topology and try the socket approach? But then I would still have the problem with her pupil placement.
Any help here is appreciated.
eye