Hmm, I thought I had a problem solved, but it popped up gagain.
I’m going an anime girl for a video game and I had the problem where they eyes would bulge out of her face. It was then told to me that anime eyes are actually flat, like cartoon eyes, and nor round. It was offered to place the eye spheres into a lattice and articulate the eyes though that.
It worked and I was happy.
Well, it seems that my exporter does not support lattices so now I’m back at square one again. I need some help in a direction to take…
Here is my idea…
I can apply the lattice, permanently making the eyes flat. I then can articulate the iris as a separate model that is on the surface of the eye. This will work, but I don’t quite know how to constrain the model to the surface. Can someone toss out some ideas?
The eye is not perfectly flat, as you can see from the lattice deform. How about can I do this with a little tearing out of my hair as possible?
I think the idea you have is a good one, except rather than add the iris as a separate object, add it as a texture decal. It’s possible to attach the texture coordinates to an empty (animating the empty animates the texture.) kernond has just produced a video tutorial on Basic Decaling in Blender. The question would be whether your game supports this.
The other possibility is to consider the flattened surface of the eyeball as actually a small portion of a much larger sphere, and determine where the center of that sphere is. Then place a bone at that point, move the other end of the bone to the eyeball surface, attach a second bone at the eyeball surface end and tie this second bone to the iris object. Then when you rotate the first bone, it sweeps the surface of the eyeball, carrying the second bone and the iris along with it.
I can’t animate textures… The only thing I can move with a bone is vertexes and objects. I gave the “surface iris” a shot and failed. The eye is not uniformly flat, nor is it uniformly spherical. Any other ideas?
