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Eye Rigger 3.0 with Cartoony Eyeball..?

Rigging General
#1

Hi everyone, I know that cartoon-style eyes have always been problematic in mgear and probably still are. Nevertheless, I’d like to ask whether there’s a recommended workflow for rigging eyelids on oval or cartoon-style eyes. Perhaps something new has emerged with the new facerig-tooset (which is brilliant, by the way!) in the latest version of mgear.

I’m asking because I’ll soon need to rig some cartoon-style eyes, and I’m wondering whether anyone has already managed to do this using the new tools, and if so, how. To make matters more complicated, I’ll ideally need to export the animation as an FBX file.

I’d be grateful for any advice. Christian

#2

You could try something like this: (general ideas, not specific tutorial)

  • Rig the spherical eye in any way you see fit. (In this case, the mGear eye.)
  • Create 2 nurbs spheres. One a perfect sphere (unit). The other in the proportions of your cartoony eye (deformed). The deformed sphere can also be squashed and stretched in your animation. Try not to have a 0,0 UV pole near the middle of the eye. Keep the poles at the top and side if possible.
  • Get the closestPointOnSurface on the unit sphere, for each eye joint.
  • Drive resulting joints on to those UV coordinates on the deformed sphere.
  • The unit sphere eye rig can stay fixed in place. Add some local controls on your animated character that follow the head. Animating the local controls connect-drives the unit controls.
  • There will likely be some distortion in the deformed joints. You might need to give them some extra aim or up-vector orientation to make a more pleasing shape in extreme poses.

None of that unit stuff will get exported, so for FBX, your final driven joints are all that matter in your skeleton.

Ultimately the mGear eye is just meant as a way to rotate joints around a sphere and interpolate between curves. The curves define the open eye lid contours and the blinking contours. If you break down how it works you might be able to make something similar on a planar surface that you can bend to match the contours of your cartoony geometry, and find a way to cleanly deform those interpolating curves.

3 Likes
#3

Many thanks… i´ll give it a try!