Right, slight modelling problem. I model a head (nose, mouth, blah, blah, you get the picture) and I want to add eyeballs. Now I do my usual method where I introduce a UV sphere into the scene (nothing too fancy) and texture it. Now here’s the problem…when I put the eyeball behind where the eye socket is, the eyeball overlaps the socket. Is there a way in modifying the head mesh (or eyeball) WITHOUT resorting to adding an eyeball by editing the head mesh (I hate RVKs, I can’t use them…).
It’s tricky. You stick the eye eye on a seperate layer so you don’t mess up then Shft-D duplicate it and put the dup on the original layer and in the head further back than the original so it doesn’t touch. Then you Ctrl-J it to the head. Then hit O for Proportional editing and select one vert of the eye part and L with your mouse over it to select all its verts. G and use your mousewheel to expand the Circle of influence so it just catches the socket verts. Move your eye to where you want it and use your mousewheel to relax the socket verts back as far as need be.
Snap your 3D Cursor to the eye, X to delete, choose Verts. Tab out of edit mode and move your eye eye back to the head layer and snap it to your 3D cursor.
While doing the Proportional editing you can hide parts of the head that you don’t want influenced or will be in the way, and you can use only verts from the front of the eye by hiding or deleting the others.
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You can also use the “To Sphere” function to get the basic shape, then finish editing surrounding vertexes by hand. (“To Sphere” doesn’t work with proportional editing)
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Position the eye sphere where you want it relative to the mesh.
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Place the cursor at the sphere’s center. (Do a “center new” first on the sphere if you have to)
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In Edit Mode, select the vertexes you would like to have conform to
the shape of the eye. -
Go to the Editing buttons (F9) and in the Mesh Tools panel, click the To Sphere button. Confirm 100%.
Scale these vertexes out from the eye’s center a bit and create some thickness for the eyelids.
I don’t really like RVKs much either. You should keep your eye as a sphere because that’s physically accurate and mould the socket around it.
I make a curve of verts on the socket to follow the curvature of the eye at the centre. Imagine the edge of a closed eyelid. Then, I place the cursor or a bone at the centre of the eye and rotate the points around that. That way, the eyelid follows the eye quite closely. It does help a great deal to give the eyelid some thickness though as rwv01 said.
Thanks guys, those are really good tips - I never thought of that. Thanks