I have a set of circular glasses that use eyelids within them and for the life of me I can think of a way to make them have expressions (ie blink, slant, wink, go square, etc).
Shape keys won’t work because of how vertices use straight line movement to the end point and the shrinkage during travel. I’ve tried various ways to bring them up and down but nothing has worked. They either collapse leaving gaps that can be seen through between the rims and the lids or I end up with arcs where I need them to be flat.
I really don’t want to have to animate these with multiple bones.
Any suggestions on how I can accomplish this would be appreciated.
Thanks for your quick reply and the blend file Okidoki, but this is not the effect I’m after. As you can see in that first GIF, I am at that point.
Maybe this will help you understand. This is what I mean by shutter type lids.
I’ve rigged these lids with bones. What I need is for the lids to be able to open, close and express emotions. But I need them not to extrude beyond the rims of the glasses.
Now that I have set this up, this would be the answer, but I can’t figure out how to stop the extrusions of the lids beyond the rims and keep the slits the openings are making, flat.
It might gum up performance a bit, but you could setup a boolean modifier to just keep the portion of the shutters that is intersecting the eye opening.
Quick idea, no time to test: make a full closed circle for the eye lid and try to “hide” the moving part with a boolean (each upper and lower has to be separate object off cours and the circle solidified )…
Thanks for the replies, but I’m not keeping this model in Blender, I’m going to be porting it into the Valve Source1 engine, and the export and compile for the engine would not retain a modifier to restrict the movement outside the rims.
Yup, a brain puzzler… But it must be able to be done somehow.
Thanks Grafx but rotating doesn’t do the trick either. The eyes are flat, not spheres and rotation creates an open void when animating.
This is the type of effect I’m after, but don’t want to have to throw 64 more bones at animators that they’ll have to position manually with whatever expression they want to make.
The engine I’m using doesn’t support follow curves and there are just too many expressions that would have to be baked and appended to the model for this to be a viable option.
Sorry for the WAY tardy reply Okidoki, but I haven’t been on line or modeling for a while. (Too many real life situations (hospitalizations, death in the family, etc) getting in the way.)
That was a really interesting video you posted, thank you.
I only wish the game engine I was creating this for (Valve Source Engine) would use something like that, but it is a pretty primitive engine and there’s no way I could set up a complex rig like that for the eyes.
The solution I came up with using automated textures is doing well, as bubble gum patched that it is, but thank you again for thinking of me.
I am just scaling on Z axis, but this scaling can be done using a shape key. This is a simple shrinkwrap modifier setup however it is not clear if this can used in the engine. Probably you can turn it into series of shapekeys if the engine supports it
