basic cartoon eyes setup

here’s a very basic cartoon eyes setup within maya aimed to be used in animation. basically this tutorial should help you getting you on the road for further development stages to simplify the control of a pair of eyes by combining it with maximum flexibility.

create a nurbs sphere, rotate it by 90 degrees so the poles are not pointing up (always assure you’re in local space). add a ramp to the color attribute of the shader which should be lambert1 by default. the color ramp should start with black and switches to white without a gradient to white. if you turned hardware texturing on in shading then you should immediately see in the viewport that this generates a black pupil on a white eye (you may have to switch to u ramp as type). an eye like this looks very dull when rendering. add some spice by duplicating this nurb, scale it a tiny little bit up, put a blinn shader on the new sphere and make it completely transparent. this way you’ll add a nice highlight to the eyeball. to finish this process, group those two spheres and name the group to your own taste.

let’s go for the eye lids: make another copy of the sphere, enter component mode and move the top control vertex (take the poles with some control vertex below) down into the sphere. the result is an upper/ lower eye lid. duplicate and turn it around. you now should have two eye lids covering the eye ball; you may have to transform/ rotate the objects to cover the eye ball nicely.

now we’re going to create the controls. first create a locator in front of the eye with a little distance. select the locator first, then the eye ball, freeze their transformations (which will keep you from making offset adjustions later on) and constrain > aim along the axis the eye is looking at (to the locator). now add an attribute called “blink” to the locator (modify > add attribute…), set the minimum to 0 and the maxium to 10 (in numeric attribute properties). you can choose whatever maximum value you want but this should work fine as you don’t want to scrub around too far when letting the eye blink. now animate > set driven key > set… and define the locator as the driver and both eye lids as the driven. the locator (driver) should be set to “blink” and the eye lids to rotatex (in my case). now open your ideas wide open, set “blink” in the attributes editor (within extra attributes) to 10 and set a key in the “set driven key” window: key it. close the eye completely by rotating back the eyelids, set “blink” to 0 and key again. now you can scrub the “blink” attribute in the attribute editor window under extra attributes.

save the file and import the same file again. this nice trick loads the same elements into the scene but automatically renamed and functioning completely independent: move the imported set to the side and there is your second eye! create a circle between the two locators and parent them to it. now you can move around the circle to control the 2 locators. when you rotate the circle the eyes get really crazy which is so much fun to play with.

the great thing is that you now can play with the blink settings in the graph editor to ease in/ out the rotation of the blink animation, to make it smoother; you can also put a lattice on the eyes and stretch them and the control still work perfectly fine. so go and enjoy your fresh pair of eyes

Tagged as: aim, blink, driven key, eye, maya, setup