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How
to move the eyes around in the head.
First
of all, when I say eyes I mean spheres or ovals with an FFD modifier,
not flat polygons.
There's
a few different ways I can think of to rig the eyes. The first thing,
of course, is to link them to the head so that they move with the rest
of the body.
So
here are the different rigging techniques I know of, listed from the most
basic to more complex.
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Technique
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Pros
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Cons
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| Rotate
each eye individually. |
•
No setup time. |
•
Not efficient.
• Can be hard to select eyes when animating. |
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Use
an Orientation Constraint to make one eye follow the other.
*Click
here for step by step instructions.
|
•
Minimal setup time.
• Only have to rotate one eye, not both. |
•
Can be hard to select eyes when animating.
• Have to remember which eye is the "slave" and which
is the "controller"
• Can be hard to work with if you want to move the eyes independently
of each other at any time. |
|
Use
an Orientation Constraint on both eyes to make them follow
a helper object.
*Click
here for step by step instructions.
|
•
Only have to rotate the one helper object to rotate both eyes.
•You can scale and position the helper object so that it's easy
to grab and rotate.
• The helper object is always in the same place in relation to
the head, so it's easy to find. |
•
Takes a little longer to set up.
• You still have to manually rotate the eyes to make them follow
another object in the scene (see the next technique to understand
what I'm talking about). |
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Use
a LookAt Constraint on both eyes to make them always follow
a specific object.
*Click
here for step by step instructions.
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•
You can use any object in the scene for the LookAt Target.
So you could, for example, use a tennis ball for the LookAt Target
to make someone watching a tennis match automatically follow the
ball as it goes back and forth.
• You can define multiple LookAt Targets and then animate
the weighting between them to make the eyes look at one object after
another. |
•
It can be harder to keep track of the LookAt Target, as opposed
to the Orientation Constraint helper, which is always in the
same place.
• If not set up properly, the eyes can go "cross-eyed".
• It's more work to move a helper around the screen that it is
to rotate a helper in place, like you do with the Orientation Constraint
technique. |
While
I'm sure there are even more ways to control the eyes in a scene, the
ones I mentioned above are tried and true techniques that will work for
all normal animation needs.
That
being said, you can still take the above techniques further by adding
more controllers and customizing them for specific needs. Here some things
you can do:
•
Use the Rotation List controller so that you can still rotate
the eyes manually, and independently from each other, if you want.
*Click here for step by step instructions.
• Add a Noise Rotation controller (with Rotation
List) to give the eyes a kind of cartoon wobbly effect, like after
getting hit in the head. *Click here
for step by step instructions.
• Use Wire Parameters and Custom Attributes to set
up a slider that would let you rotate the eyes slightly toward each
other or away from each other. You would do this to add to the realism
of a character. When a person looks at something close, their eyes tend
to turn inward, toward each other. And when looking at something in
the distance they turn slightly away from each other. *Click
here for step by step instructions.
• Use a LinkedXForm modifier, Custom Attributes,
and Wire Parameters to dilate and contract the pupils. *Click
here for step by step instructions.
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