Animating a simple comic Character

Hi everybody!

I’m using Blender for almost a year now and created my first comic character. It’s basically an orange with two eyes and a mouth with 2 teeth.

I startet to watch tutorials about rigging, but I only could find tutorials about rigging a human body and not a sphere so I decided to use shape keys, which is working fine for the facial animation.
But now I want to animate the whole ‘body’, the technical sphere. I could do it with shape keys but here’s my problem: It want to animate the eyes seperately of course. So when I animate the body with shape keys and proportional editing it doesn’t affect the eyes because they aren’t part of the same mesh.
Is there any way I can affect the eyes with using shape keys on the body-mesh? Or is it easy to actually rig the body? I’m stuck right now, hope somebody can help!

Thx!

I suggest putting it all in a lattice with empty’s and bones to control. That way when you stretch the orange the eyes will stretch with it. putting bones in the eyes and you can rotate the eyes and keep the deform.
That’s the way my avatar is rigged. bones in the legs. eye lid bones and driver. body has a lattice for stretch and squish.