I must mention that I’m very new to Blender, I’m still learning it while trying to create and following tutorials.
Description:
What I’m trying to create supposed to work great (only in my mind…) using shape keys but it didn’t work well as I thought so I need to find another way and hopefully it won’t be complicated to do consider I’m a noob.
Cartoon Eyelids:
I’ve created the eyelids already on a neutral position, I used the solidify modifier to get some thickness.
So far everything looks great, the eyelids are sitting over the eyeball, I’ve made the first shape key which are close, it looks great.
The problem:
When I’ve manipulated manually again the edge loops of the eyelids in order to create a WIDE OPEN eyelids shapekey it looks really good until I tested it with the 0-1 shape key value.
when it’s on 0 it’s great, when it’s on 1 it’s great. but while the values are inbetween movement (in order to animate it in the future) the eyelids are get INSIDE the eyeball a bit, and not wrapping the eyeball perfectly.
So I was wondering, is there a sweep control on a sphere that I can animate?
I even found a good example used in Maya because it is perfectly close and open dynamically in a perfect sphere.
Can somebody show me a video-tutorial that does the same principle but in Blender please?
it will be very helpful because I will be able to watch and follow step-by-step.
Maya example for cartoon eyelids:
Please watch the part starting on 3:17s just CLICK HERE TO WATCH
I have a couple ideas, but they are both ugly, one is multiple shapekeys, and the other involves the shrinkwrap modifier. Here is a little diagram of the issue and a simple blend if anyone wants. Richards solution is quite clever, but can only be used if the eye is a perfect sphere (really a semicircle) and it would not allow for multiple shapekeys.
Looks great Tim, thanks for helping in this!
It looks good but also complicated at the same time, I also notice when I use the “one piece” it’s always have this ugly 1 vertex on the center where the sphere should rotate, I couldn’t get rid of it in my early experiments.
But my latest experiment is with the 2 bones, I hope it will solve the problem… still I would love to hear more creative solutions for this, I bet there is a more simple and good looking way compare to the bones I just did:
It’s not bad… it works… but what do I know, I’m a noob
Since it’s a cartoon eyeball, I’d use two hemispheres for the lids, one for the top, one for the bottom, controlled by an upper eyelid and lower eyelid bone. Make the upper eyelid just slightly larger than the lower eyelid to avoid artifacts that might occur when they are exactly the same size. The screw modifier looks closest to the tool shown in the Maya video. However, the screw modifier only works in one direction, so you’ll need two objects, one for the upper eyelid, the other for the lower, and two controls.
You won’t be able to do this easily with shape keys, since Blender interpolates linearly between the 0.0 and the 1.0 position. You’d have to use at least two (per eyelid) and connect them with a driver so that the vertices they control move on a curve instead of a straight line. How’s your trig?
Thanks Orinoco, this is what I’ve done using the bones, so far it works great.
I think I’ll try to add a lattice over the eyelids + eyeball to get it more elastic, maybe it will work.
