Rigging question

#1

Hello,

I’m pretty new to animation/modeling in general. I’m trying to create a character based off of Wheatley from Portal 2 (basically a robotic eyeball). All I’m trying to do at the moment is to get the pieces of the eyeball moving moving together but slightly out of sync to add some character to it (it consists of a iris (partial sphere), upper and lower eye lids, and a ring around the edge. All of the pieces involved have the center of rotation in the center, so I’ve been moving them with a simple rotation.

What would be the best tool to use to make these items move together? (I’ve tried binding everything to a skeleton/ IK handle and making it a softbody, as seen in an antenna rigging tutorial, with no effect). Any thoughts/resources for further learning would be much appreciated!

~Jester

#2

I would suggest you to use set driven key! two joints at the centre of the eye, one skinned to upper lid, one to the lower … just do a quick sdk on the rotation of the joints via a controller or attribute.

#3

Thank you for the response! This has worked wonderfully for the eyelids :beer: . However I’m still trying to get all of the pieces (iris, set of eyelids and outer ring) to operate together. So that when prompted with a target, the iris starts moving first, followed by the eyelids a few frames later, followed by the ring. The closest thing I have found for this is applying a softbody property to an IK handle, as shown in a tutorial about making a dynamic antenna(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFhp9l82-DM). However I can’t seem to get this feature to work. Is there another tool out there that fits my needs? Or should I keep trying this one?

Thanks again
~Jester

#4

nope, no skinning required here, no deformations are happening…

just two control objects in the center of the ball (try to think from where the eyelids rotate - the center of the sphere, cuz if they were complete, they would be a sphere…) and parent constraint those eyelids to them… you can do SDK, but i don’t think you need to, just animate the rotation on those control objects…

i don’t see no reason why would you use softbodies in here, unless theres a higher plan in mind ^^

#5

Thanks for the help! I’ll try that, and it sounds like maybe using the graph editor is the way to go here to effect the timing lag between objects that I want.

#6

I can’t remember exactly how the eye works in portal, but if you automat things like that, a animator will hate you because he/she will want to have more control.

Having said that, if all you want is a time delay, you can write an expression something like;

outerRing.rotateX = getAttr -t (frame - iris.Lag) iris.rotateX;
outerRing.rotateY = getAttr -t (frame - iris.Lag) iris.rotateY;
outerRing.rotateZ = getAttr -t (frame - iris.Lag) iris.rotateZ;

Add a extra attribute to your iris control called Lag so you can set how many frames back it copies the rotation from and then this expression will look at the rotation values back in time and set the outer ring to them.

That will work, however there is no secondary motion, plus the aniamtor has limited control.

You might want to add the expression to a group node above the ring and add a control to the ring as well. That way you can set the lag to 0 and have a aniamtor control the movement when needed, or you can just use the expression when it’s not too important.

Richard

#7

Ok I think I understand the concept behind what your saying. I guess I’ll have to read up on these expressions. Luckly I’m the animator for this :slight_smile: so I’ll just use the graph editor to offset key frames for now. Thank you and nice website that trex is awesome!

#8

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