Eyeball + Eyelids + Lattice Deformer ??

Hello All,

It may be a stupid question but I’m a noob in Blender so please be gentle… :eek:

OK! so I want to add a lattice deformer to a complete eyeball that include Eyelids (3 objects).
I did not use blend-keys as one object because the eyelids won’t work as smooth as it is now (I found it works on my earlier thread and I’m happy with it).

The problem is, if you’ll look at the file (attached) once you parent the 3 objects to the lattice, the eyelids resets and cannot be controlled with the armature anymore…

Is there a way to make the bones work INSIDE a lattice deformer? or another modifier that can do something like that?

I would love to solve this one so I can tweak the eyeball as I want and also have lots of controls on the eyelids at the same time.

Thanks ahead and sorry about my bad English.

Eyelids_Test-1a.blend (824 KB)

I do not know what to say cause it works for me. If that is what you are trying to do.
http://www.pasteall.org/blend/34063

Hey kazinger!
Thanks for the fast reply! haha! it works on your file but when I parent the bunch of stuff to the lattice I get the weird result I’ve described above.

Here is my attempt:
Eyelids_Test-1b.blend (825 KB)

What am I doing wrong? :\

Here’s an idea I had. There’s a fair amount of work in it. It uses bone constraints to control the loops based off the master bone’s rotation. To see the other bones bone.001 - bone.007 make them visible in the outliner. On the constrained bones, click the tab with the bone and chain icon. You can see that each successive bone gets less and less influence from the master, which acts to squeeze (or enlarge) the loops, which is definitely what you want. As the topology changes you will (and must) have larger faces as the overall surface area increases. This density change must be done in a graduated and smooth manner. So unless there’s a dedicated tool, or some python, this is one of the few solutions for a single mesh. Most other methods will all suffer from blender’s internal interpolation choices.

Eyelid Idea on dropbox

Looks great Tim! that’s a really smart solution as well, it reminds me of a fan mechanism.
But at the same time it looks complicated for how it works and the setup itself not looks simple for a noob like myself.
I can see many uses for different rigs for creatures, monsters “dragon-like” with fins for example, very cool and useful!

As I mentioned I don’t have a problem with the current simple eyelids and bones I made, they are working perfect for what I need but the problem is that I can’t get all the parts to be parented by the lattice.
Kazinger made it work pretty easy, but I don’t know how he did that… I wonder where I’ve gone wrong and what Kazinger did so it works.

I know that I select the lattice last, but that’s not the problem… so I wonder what I’m missing?

I didn’t realize kazinger had posted a blend. I looked at your file and came up with practically the same thing as him. In Kazinger’s blend the eyelids are not parented to the lattice. And they shouldn’t be. If anything the lattice should be parented to one of the bones.

This is how I would organize and create an eyeball rig for your eye.

youtube link

Nice video.

Thanks. It’s basic but does pretty much anything you want, and also allows for shape keys. I should have mentioned that all 3 of those bones should have ‘deform’ unchecked so they don’t affect auto weighting later. If you use this rig with your main rig, the master bone would be parented to the head bone.

These rigs are tricky, here’s a typical timeframe for making them

1st rig: 3 weeks of hell and BA threads
2nd rig: 3 hours of minor pain
3rd rig: 6 minutes.
:eek:

That’s a really helpful video tutorial Tim! thank you so much :slight_smile:
I can’t try it by myself right now but I’ll have to test it see if I understand all the steps you’re showing.

This “cartoon eye” rig you’ve managed to setup looks very dynamic and it can fit almost ANY cartoon character I may create in the future, I just have to see if I totally understood all the steps first.

I’m not sure if I understood it because I only watched it once for now… but did you add a lattice deformer to each eyelid object and parent them to the main lattice? maybe I’m confused because of the names so I didn’t follow what you’ve done.

I would watch the video and follow along with your blend. But no, the lattice object itself is parented to the master bone.

You’re totally right, I will follow and try it step-by-step as soon as I get home.
I talked about what you’re doing from 4:00 it seems like you add a lattice deformer to each eyelid before you continue… so it’s like total of 3 lattice deformers but maybe I didn’t understand what you’re doing there so I will be smarter when I’ll try it by myself.

Keep up the good job!

Maybe I’m not visualizing your idea for the lattice. Take your time, make the rig along with the video, see how it works and see if it fulfills the functionality you need. If not explain how and we can modify it to get what you need. And get some sleep, isn’t it like 2 in the morning!

Actually it looks exactly like what I’m trying to do but I will have to give it a shot and see how it works when playing with it.
Haha! it’s 5:11… no time for sleep when I’m working on client’s project. :wink:

I’ll check it out as soon as I can and hopfully it will work and I’ll also understand how it’s done by doing it (thanks to your video tutorial!).

I realized this morning that the rig wasn’t complete. I had forgottten to add a way for the eyeball to rotate independantly from the the eyelids. I’m going to put this parenting chart up, and I’ll post my finished eye rig blend. See if you can recreate it.

Eye rig blend on dropbox


I just grabbed it and it’s perfect!!! very dynamic and I bet lots of noobs like myself will see this very useful eyeball+eyelids rig!
I hope to try rid this step-by-step following the well organized chart, it makes lots of sense now but I hope I’ll make it work from scratch in order to learn and understand the full process.

Thanks a lot, I appreciate it a lot Tim! :slight_smile:

When you get time try to make it from scratch. But also you can just keep a library of re-usable parts. You should know how to do it, but also you don’t need to re-invent the wheel every time. You can add shapekeys to a lattice (and keyframe them) that’s what I did here in the World Premiere of:
“Dance of the Mutant Eyeball!”

HAHA! That’s brilliant Tim! It seems that the 2 half-spheres eyelids are working fine even with toon shaders, that’s cool!

I just uploaded a short testing video, I’m still wondering if I should go for the “easier” way with making shape-keys to the main lattice or actually add bones with controls… hmm, trying to think what I will find more usable while animating but I still have lots of work to do in general so I don’t know yet. Also, Drivers may come handy soon… I’m still scared from this but also excited about the final result.

Also I gave you credits on the description for the mighty help :wink:

Before clicking the PLAY button…
I highly recommend you to MUTE (the song is annoying… yeah sorry about that). :o

Awesome. I give it 5 Jellyfish!

I would create 1 or more shape keys for the lattice. And then add a bone and a driver to control it for each shape key. It will be much easier animating them.

The funny thing (at least for a noob like myself) is… that I didn’t even realise how much “rigging” I’ll do on a simple eyeball.
And the possibilities are endless with what I can get with the current rig + shape keys and drivers for the all thing.

I have an idea for a really good control for the rig in general:
It will be VERY cool if I’ll be able to make a “GUI PANEL” for the face, and put it on it’s own camera.
So while animating I will have a window open with that camera that shows the GUI Panel with all the sliders or whatever I’ll need to do.
and I can focus on the main animation and also on the face with that panel…

I may be thinking too much about that “supposed to be simple rig” and it’s becoming more and more complicated but I think it may be useful when I’ll get into the animation part… but still just thinking about how to create an interactive sliders based on drivers and simple shapes to scroll with limits and stuff is probably too advanced for me.

But anyways, what do you think about this crazy idea? (crazy because I’m a noob… hehe)