Eye modeling and rigging

[Sixcolors]

What's everyone's favorite method for making an eyeball and rigging it for animation? Specifically, if you were going to make a large, odd-shaped eyeball for a cartoon character, how might you go about it?

I'm working on a character for my character design and setup class and my character has a rather large eye. I'll post some pics.

[graduisc]

cheggit. might help after a bit of goo goo ing.

http://student.vfs.com/~m07goosh/Tutorials/cartoonyeyes/cartoonyeyes.htm

[Shon Mitchell]

for eyes that are cartoonish or the size of dinnerplates, you can't resort to using convention spheres, they either wont fit in the head appropriately or turning a deformed sphere can cauze clipping, Instead you would need to just model them out in their basic shape, and keep the pupils and iris as either seperate geometry and rig thatm or as a controllable texture and wig the face up to allow you to maniputale the iris texture realtime

[Sixcolors]

for eyes that are cartoonish or the size of dinnerplates, you can't resort to using convention spheres, they either wont fit in the head appropriately or turning a deformed sphere can cauze clipping, Instead you would need to just model them out in their basic shape, and keep the pupils and iris as either seperate geometry and rig thatm or as a controllable texture and wig the face up to allow you to maniputale the iris texture realtime

Thanks, for some reason I didn't think of that. I should have, though, considering how much I loved the movie Cars when it came out. :P It's sometimes the simplest solution that we miss.

[Sixcolors]

cheggit. might help after a bit of goo goo ing.

http://student.vfs.com/~m07goosh/Tutorials/cartoonyeyes/cartoonyeyes.htm

What is this goo goo you speak of?

j/k

I Googled the hell out of it, but I never saw this. :P Thanks for the link!

[Sixcolors]

I found the solution I was looking for at CG Talk.

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=7&t=495807

Basically it involves creating a plane for the eye and a separate object for the iris and pupil. Then you use Constrain > Normals and Constrain > Geometry. If all goes as it should, the pupil/ iris will slide along the surface of the eye (using a locator, of course). There's no in-depth tutorial, but I can figure out the rest through trial and error.

[rocktavious]

Depends on how complicated you want the eye setup to be. A few posts above the suggestion from CG Society is actually a really good one if you just wan the pupils to move around but if your looking for eye lid movements you can do it two ways. Bones would be the simplest way but if your working with non-spherical eyes it will be almost impossible to rig it with bones so if you have non-spherical eyes the best way to rig the eye-lids will be with blend shapes, from open the closed, and just create a custom attribute on nurbs spline or something that you can dial in the blendshape with.