3D Animation Tip 2: The Secret of the eye

The trick is to get it the eye to stretch into your proper shape and size.

There's a trick we do in 3D Studio Max where we make two more spheres on top of the eyeball sphere. And then we also make the pupil another sphere on top of the eyeball. There's a feature in Max where you can choose what percentage of the sphere you want, in order to cut it in half.

By creating four versions of the same sphere, we can scale the pupil sphere down to a smaller size that rests on the eye. We then make upper eyelid and lower eyelids with the other two spheres. These two are basically half spheres. We can then rotate them around the pupil to do blinking and emotion with the eyelids.

We then do a stretch scale on all four spheres together. They keep their center point even though they are being scaled. The result is a pupil that you can rotate perfectly around the eye and eyelids that also rotate around the stretched eye, and they keep the proper deformations as they move around. That's what we do in our 3D films here...

Fruits VS Bugs 1:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfbGzAuOTlM

Fruits VS Bugs 2:



Now check this Bullet animation:


What they do is they actually painted on the uppereyelid on the eyeball. Then they blink and pull emotion with simple squash, stretch, scale, and rotation of the eyeball on the character. So they get the eyelid to express emotion just by rotating the eye, rather than rotating the eyelid separate from the eyeball.

- TAE