Mouth & eyelid animation

Hi

I’ve made a total of 3 penguin models now :slight_smile:
I always start over due to a lack of animation possibilities. The last one has an armature which works just good enough to put him in the correct pose for a render.

I finally want to get it right this time. So I need some questions answered:

  • Do i make my penguin one large mesh (including eyes, mouth, teeth and stuff)
  • How do I correctly model / texture and animate nice (“integrated”) mouth/eyelids? Up until now I just slapped on some spheres for the eyelids, and a seperately modeled mouth…

So basically, how do I correctly make an easily and fully animated penguin :slight_smile:

I want to do it right from the beginning. Some links to good tutorials that I appearently couldn’t find would be great. I’ve always done subsurf modeling, dno if maybe i should switch to NURBS?

btw: as a goodbye to the previous model, i made a quick render starring him :slight_smile:
http://www.student.kuleuven.ac.be/~m0324709/pics/wizard.png

Alright, I’ve found the documentation on RVK. Apologies for my laziness :slight_smile:

So all I need now is a good tutorial on modeling characters, ie eyes/eyelids, attaching arms/legs, mouth… I’ve seen some examples but can’t figure out how to do it myself.

RVK is now a (slightly) obselete with the advent of hooks in blender

this generally allows for easier animation of vertices… (through basic key-framing, i might add)

they’re a good thing to have

or, you can use lattices, which can also be used in ways similar to RVKs

i hope this helps
~Delta

It seems to me those hooks can only be used for basic translation/rotation/scaling of vertices. So I don’t see how this is to effectively replace RVK’s?

True, IMO I don’t think that RVK could be replaced by hooks…

Env

Hi DonPingu,

I think there is not a right way to do it … so, for me it is easier work on separeted meshes… usually i have one mesh for the body, another for the head (to have less vertices using RVK) with mouth with or without eyelids, other for the inside of the mouth, other for teeth, etc.
I had some problems with eyelids… when the eyes are spherical it is easier make the eyelids a diferent mesh and animate with bones, if it is realistic or more planar it is easier build it in the mesh of the head and animate it with RVK…

How to model the mouth and eyelid depends of their shapes and how they will behave on the animation…

I think subsurf is much better than nurbs…actually after subsurf I have never used nurbs again…:wink:

Hope it helps
Kha :smiley:

P.S. I’ve made this character for a super hero contest, using the way I’ve described here…: http://img91.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img91&image=Kha_ElKabong_30.jpg

So if you’re using different meshes, how do you keep everything “in place” when animating the armature ?

Ok, using the image it is easier to follow…

I create separeted meshes but one important thing is to have vertices of the boundaries of the separated partes in the same positions if you don’t want have seams when you animate it, and those vertices must be connected to the same bone…

http://img108.exs.cx/img108/8792/Kha_Elysium.jpg
link: http://img108.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img108&image=Kha_Elysium.jpg

Kha :smiley: