Cartoon eyelid controls test / wip

[SpookyMunky]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWqQ6Vk3OJg

Sorry for the long boring vid, skip forward a minute or so for the more fun stuff . I was making a quick cube character to experiment on (they are my crash test dummies in 3d, gotta keep replacing them) and went went a bit ocd on the eyelids hehe.. this is my take on Christopher Crouzet's ccEyeRig model that I came across a while ago. I kind of set it as a personal challenge to see what I could come up with without looking at his model again to cheat (not that I could ever figure out how he did it anyway, too dumb hehe) .

I haven't dialed everything in 100% yet, seems to be best at doing evil eyes and nothing else. or that could just be me >:).. I'm curios what people think about the controllers and how annoying / handy / whatever they would be in that kind of state ?... any suggestions for reducing my paramater set ?.. or in general anything at all you'd do differently I would find interesting .. I'v never really been much of an animator...

[Draise]

This is great! Love the little widgets you have for it, very intuitive, easy to use, very good controls, and novel to have the transparency controls also. Great. Loved how you see the indent of his corneas below the eyelids, you could do some kickass animation while he is asleep and dreaming.

I have learnt how to make expressions for shape controls, but I haven't learnt how to make dynamic widgets. What is the technique you're using? Do you have links to some more info? Tutorials? I'd love to learn what you did to get your awesome eye controls.

EDIT: Hang on, you mentioned a rig you studied. Good teccnique.

I use a lot of parameters, but I place parameters in different tabs, so you can isolate controls when you need them. I am not sure why you have a third pair of arrow controls below the middle arrows of the eyelids. But other than that, I think it's all very good. I would also recommend maybe some general squash/stretch/bulge eye controls. Maybe move the central arrow controls away from the eyes and to the side, for animation visibility sake. But other than that, I want your rigging talent. =)

Keep up the good work!

Will you animate him?

[SpookyMunky]

thankyou for the glowing response ! , made me smile...

I'm not sure what you mean by dynamic widgets ?.. widget to me always been silly spinny thing in cans of beer.. hmm .. I guess you mean the controller arrow thingys ? hehe, ok widget prolly better word for them . The arrows cant actually move themselves, what is happening is they are enveloped to nulls that control their shape.... the roots of the nulls are constrained to the actual object which enables it to move and rotate etc.. .. the bones rotations are linked with a couple of nulls that are constrained to the curve that the controller is actually distorting........... hope all of this makes sense .. it is all a bit hacked, wanted to have some sort of reference to the curves that are being deformed without having to show the curve.. did I mention I was ocd ? .. basically the complete root of the bones in the controls is rotation constrained to the polymsh, its child is position constrained.. scale on the polymesh's x axis I have linked with the bones to move away from the mesh's center, which in turn effects the position of their rotation controllers position on the curve.......

hehe, sigh, this whole rig is very much a hack, sorry .. I want to make a video tutorial but lol.. itd be many hours long... hmm...

The third pair of controls is the bottom eyelids shape when its open, admittedly it doesnt really need to be there.. I couldnt leave it out tho .. both the top and bottom eyelids share the same closed position, they have their own open condition too, have tried to make the transition automatic, but hmm, thats where I have like eyetracking having manual override of the actual position where the two shapes start to swap.... hmm

extra controls for the actual face / lattices etc are on the list.. hmm, the layout I could add controller offsets .. . an offset controller to move everything out of the way like the main blink / whatever controlers are if people want to though is def worth adding, thanks

I doubt you want me rigging tallent since for this kinda thing it was pretty much zero, just got obsessed a tiny bit and brute forced a solution, lol.. I'm not an animator really, but if I can make this useable I may use it in future work (like the auto eyelids eyeball tracking stuff.. lol, as a non animator, yay brain for making that work !).. will see if I can clean it up to a point where its presentable n give it away as part of a gear rigged character, let animators use it or something, I dunno.. has been more about learning xsi a bit more than anything..