Hi everyone, hope this is the right place to ask this.
I’m currently making a Rick Sanchez model and plan to use it to animate a small scene from Rick and Morty just as a fun side project to learn animating things in Blender.
I found out how to use shape keys, and they’re really nice and easy to use, but after a while I found out that using them for blinking is quite difficult because the shape keys don’t really follow a path, they just clip through my model’s eyes. One workaround is to make the eyelids really thick, but I think it looks kind of bad…
So, I googled around and came to the conclusion rigging the eyelids might be a better solution. Which I think it would be but whenever I try and find a tutorial on rigging eyelids, it is either over-complicated or just not what I’m looking for. Now, I know it won’t be easy, of course, but I’m hoping someone on this forum knows of a tutorial or a method of rigging eyelids fairly cleanly. For context, it’s a perfectly spherical eye. I was hoping I could just use half of a sphere, it works perfectly for what I’m trying to achieve but, I just cannot figure out how to rig it properly.
The Pitchipoy rigify rig has eyelids. If you turn on the rigify add-on, it should be available in the add object menu,
And, here’s a model with a decent set of eyelids. It’s based loosely on the Pitchipoy rig. You can click through to the Sketchfab page and download it. The eyelids do one thing Pitchipoy doesn’t, the eyelid deform bones are parented such that they rotate as the eye closes(which is what you want). Just make sure that preserve volume is turned on in the armature modifier.
I didn’t even know that existed, thank you!
It’s a bit daunting to look at, as a beginner, but I’m sure I’ll be able to figure it out with a few tutorials!
Here’s that same rig as the model on sketchfab, but I’ve moved all the eye bones to a separate layer, so it should be easier to look at. http://pasteall.org/blend/index.php?id=46083
At its most basic, the cube shaped, control bones define the shape of the eyelid. The skinny, eye socket mechanism bones spread out from the center of the eye, and do a damped track toward the control bones. Then the actual deform bones stretch between the outer ends of those eye socket mechanism bones. That’s the guts of how it works. There is certainly more going on than that, but the most basic operation is defining the control points… bones that radiate from the center of the eye, toward the control points… and deform bones stuck to the ends of those.
A much simpler setup would be to have the deform bones at the center of the eye, and just rotate those, but that doesn’t allow any control of the eye shape, scaling of the eye, without it bugging out, or eyelids that respond to movement of the eye target like these do.
hey SkpFX, thanks for taking the time out to simplify the rig for me! it’s a lot easier to look at now, and i really like how it all moves together. hopefully i will be able to use this in my model!
