Has anyone mastered the techique of making Cartoon eyes in Messiah?
Is there an easy setup with minimum expressions or is everyone’s rig a real clunker,a real pan to re-rig but eventually works.
Without some type of lattices, is it even feasible for words like “quick and reliable” to be in the same sentence as messiah’s cartoon eye rig…
You mean just the setup? I would often set up as follows. Master null for the eyes. Parented to that, Right and Left master nulls. Eyes parented to those. Master nulls for individual eyes follow rotation of Master null. Eyes can still be crossed or offset by actually animating eye itself. I would scale the master eye nulls to change shape, and would use a follow expression, perhaps offset a frame so they wouldn’t be exactly the same in timing. Lid objects parented to the master nulls, so they get the same scaling attributes, and elongate or squash with the eye.(you could ik them if you want)
Eyes made spherical, and distorted thru scale so that the lids (also spherical) properly track the eye shape, even if you scaled the eye to be elongated.
It’s been a long time, and I will seriously be starting new character animation and rigging after the new year. I don’t recall setting up, or taking real advantage of using sliders here, etc. Will definitely be doing that, I’m sure.
Not sure if this is what you were asking, but should get the ball rolling for discussion. Another way might be to create morphs for the eye into the “odd” shape, and use morph blender. SHould allow simple pivoting to translate the same to the eyes and lids if you use the same transform on both objects in your modeling program…but that may require a test to be sure.
Best,
Rick
i remember we discussed this. i setup nulls in the eyeball of my character oval eyes and used LW distance to null ramp for the pupils. you can get quite fancy if you layer enough ramps and a nice radial noise. im sure that can be applied to any program, even displacements could be used to get the iris reflection cone.
And on mine, written in haste, I may not have been as clear as I could have been.
The Master null I use to scale the eyes closer or enlarge for takes and effects. The separate eye nulls, I use to set the angle and slant of the eyes, as well as a different scaling for a single eye…if you have characters with cartoony differences…or if you scale one eye for effect.
I also left out that you might want to use an object for the pupil as opposed to a map, for dimension. Depends on the style you want, of course.
I wonder is you used a Flex effect if you could scale the points as well as flex and make any cartoon eye you want. Have to try that when I get back home tonight. And if it’s applied to the lid as well, I wonder if you still just rotate the lid and it would deform properly over the eye…I would think it should.
Best,
Rick
There are some constructive threads about oval eyes, also with some files:
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=308870&highlight=cartoon+eyes
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=216157&highlight=cartoon+eyes
In one of the threads also the use of the XFrom effect is discussed.
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