I’ve only been using blender for about three weeks, so I hope this question doesn’t sound stupid. I’m trying to animate a head, but I can’t figure out how to link the eyes together, so that I can rotate them both with one armature, while keeping them in place, if that makes sence? I’ve tried having one come out of each eye, with another coming from it to a central armature, but the whole setup rotates around the base of the central armature, instead of the eyes rotating individually, like a car’s wheels. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
A more realistic way to animate eyes is to target them both at the same empty. This way, you can key the empty onto whatever your character is looking at, and the eyes will converge on it accordingly.
Also, you’ll want to parent them to your main control armature using the ‘bone’ setting, attached to the main head bone.
If you want to do it the other way though, you could give the eye bones copy rotation constraints to copy the rotation of the other bone (and not have them parented to it).
Thanks to you both for the great advice, I’ve got the eyes working great now. I set them to track a cube that I put in another layer, is that what you mean by an “empty”? I hear people refer often to “Empty”, but I’m not quite sure what this refers to. Anyway, I’d just like to say thanks again, this forum is probably the greatest resource for a new blender user like myself out there.
Add -> Empty. It’s described by Theeth as a placeholder, an object that has no mesh, but you can S,G,R and parent and all the rest.
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Thanks, I can’t believe I never noticed that while adding something else. 