How to do this? Constraints maybe? *Now blend included*

Support Animation and Rigging
1

Hi,

How do I let the eyes move together with a Bone which moves the head?

The eyeballs are parented to and deformed with a lattice (one for each eye).
I tried copy rotation constraint on the lattice, but it gets mixed up once the constraint is active…

Please help…

edit* also I can’t seem to move the centers of object either… even if I delete the shapekeys for the object… The lattice is doing difficult… and even without a lattice, the eyeballs center won’t move when pressing Center Cursor.

In the meantime I’ll try to search futher for a solution…

2

What I typically do to animate character eyes is create a bone called “eye_look.” This bone is used to determine where both eyes will look at.

What you will need to do is to create a bone for each eye. weight the vertexes in each eye to the appropriate bone (a value of 1). Make these bones children to the bone that deforms the head. Now, on each bone apply a track to constraint and use the “eye_look” bone as a target.

Now these bones point towards the eye_look bone. You can get cross eyes by moving the eye_look right between the eyes.

I hope this helps

3

Thanks decius… I’ve tried various things, but nothing works…
(I already had a track to constraint)

Here’s the blend file (simplified). It contains most of the body, the eyes, the lattices, the empty(track to)

Can anyone get it to work, when you rotate the upper bone, also move the eyes nicely along with it… so the eye are kept in their sockets?

It would be much helpful if anyone could show me how! Thanks!

http://home.scarlet.be/~matrix64/images/ruby_example.blend

http://home.scarlet.be/%7Ematrix64/images/help01.jpg
link to the work in progress: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=86238&page=2

4

I played with your blend file a bit. If you parent the eye lattice to the upper bone, you get fairly good behavior. Combine that with a separate eye target bone and you should be golden.

5

oh my god, it was that simple??! Haven’t thought of that… big thanks Fweeb!
After all things that I tried, I didn’t have any hope it was possible.
I was think too complex, and the solution was so close.

What do you mean with a separate eye target? I already have an empty tracking the eyes…

6

It’s always the simple solutions that elude us. Don’t worry, I’ve been in the same boat before many times.

You already have an eye target? In which case, disregard my comment. I must’ve missed it when looking at your rig. If you’re using an empty, though, I might suggest you perhaps use a bone instead. I only suggest this because then you can control the eyes with actions since the target will be part of your armature. It’s not a critical thing, but I’ve found it helpful in some of my rigs.