I’m trying to make eyelids but I can’t get it right, anyway to easily close/open them?. Any tutorials? :(. Is it better to model them in a different software? I have tons of toon sketches (in zbrush) I would like to finish but I’m stuck there.
Related question. Do animators like the ones working at pixar leave the eyeballs totally unchanged or do they also apply the squash and stretch techniques to them?
I don’t know about question 2, but for number one you might consider modeling the eyelids as a seperate subtool. Then they can be rotated to open/close as needed. Since you are talking toons, it would be an acceptible solution. That’s what I did for Cruella DeVille’s eyelids in this post…Although you don’t see her eyelids opening or closing here, they are seperate so that I was able to get her expression just right. And, as you can see, they blend into her face just fine, so they don’t even look seperate.
Thanks for the reply :D. If they are separate though, why can’t I see a line? How did you blend them?
The material just blended nicely…plus the pic is not a closeup.
hey man hi there
here this is what i do
for toons
i model them with closed eyelid but keep an opening in the middle so when i morph them i get the opening and i dont have to worry about the mesh that i need to pull out to close and open the eyes
that is my technique there are many other though
hope this helps
Are you talking about eyelids that are easy to open in close within in Zbrush at will, or how to design them to work with your 3D animation software, Maya, Lightwave, or rigging for things like Poser?
Like mentioned, a subtool just for the eyelids. That way it’s easy to shape it on the fly, or simply rotate it if it goes around a perfect sphere.
I did that once, subtool for eyelids, but never planned to do much with open and closing. I just felt the clean sharp edge suited the design compared to making the eyelids part of the head’s mesh.
You can kind of see it here:
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/zbc/showthread.php?t=55773
Another idea, if you want to stay in Zbrush alone, is to make a 3D layer where you take the currently open eyes manually close them. It could take a while the first time, but after that you could simple turn off the layer to make them eye open again, or decrease the intensity of the 3D Layer to act as a morph to meet halfway and such. Plus, hopefully it would somewhat translate with most changes to the model, or just posing.
One issue with a simple morph like that is if you have really round toon eyes, then a morph from open to close might cause the eyelid to go through the eyeball in a straight line path, instead curving around it.
When I was done with a toon I started in Zbrush I took it into Hexagon and added more edges to the open eyelid, giving me more to shape a closed eyelid morph to fit the large eye.
I had to create a 2nd morph that would push the eyelid out and back wrap around the eye as it closed or opened. I ended up rigging in Poser that gave me remote control options for dials in the coding. The result was when I used the dial for the blink morph it also controled other morphs to make it push around the eye.
Here’s how it roughly turned out: http://other.toonguru.com/3D/brisby/bris_eyelid2.gif (note, the base mesh was much lower poly, I only divided it for Poser.)
I probably have to add another morph for the end to make the eyelashes fold down more, if I did that with the main close morph it just turned the eyelashes inside out halfway down.
From a distance, the blink looks near perfect in this quick test in Poser:
http://other.toonguru.com/3D/brisby/bris_anim.gif (note the body was made from zspheres, no retopology except for the head)
Other things like moveable deformers such as magnets could be used to correct a blink such as that too, but depends on the topology and software I guess. Even s a bone might work to make an eyelid close in a curved path so it will move along an eye. Probably be not useful to try transpose in that fashion if only to assist in creating the initial close morph, but not everytime.
Well, that’s my experience eyelids so far. Only recently had to tackle that Poser eyelid challenge. The worst part was a working non-spherical eye common with toons.
