1 Tutorials LightWave 3D Eye Blink Qua Jan 26, 2011 4:01 am
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by Demian Kurejwowski |
Download source files here. |
I made this tutorial for help people like me =) and because many are posting on how to do it. First the theory The fast way to the blink is with a endomorph, but we have to have in mind that the points go trought in a linear way, from point A to point B. Many times you will be going through part of the eye (inside it, not covering it). Now, one blink can take from half a second up to 1/4 second. That's very, very fast. In some cases you can make the final morph of the eyelid a little bit bigger so this doesn't happen, especially if you are not going to make close-ups or big-eyed characters (Mike Wasaouwski!!!) The other way (the Wasaouski way) is to have a bone to control the eyelid and follow the curve of the eye. I am going to show you how to do it both ways so in the future you can choose which method is better and faster for your projects. Tip: I believe that it's easier to model the closed eye and then do the "opening" animation, because you have more control of the points! Endomorph way: After modeling your face and your eyelid for your project, create the eyeball in other layer so you can have a reference for the eyelid movement (where its pivot is going to be). pivot of action There will be 3 buttons on the lower right corner. They represent the Weight, Texture, and Morph maps respectively. Add a new morph map and name it "blink". Afterwards choose the points that correspond to the closed eyelid and move them as you want the opened one to be (you can move point by point or rotate with some falloff). Be carefull! If you are going to the base of the model or the morph to correct something always check! Where are you working? In the base or in the morph? Now save your model and send it to Layout. There we are gonna tell the program that we want to use the morph that we made. Open your object properties and in the Deform tab, under the Add Displecment look for "Morph Mixer", and add it. It will open a small box containing the blink morph in a linear line, which represents the % of the morph. Click on the Graph Editor button and this will open and insert the morph, so you can animate it later. Bone way (Wasaouwski) So, you want it to be even more realistic? That's good! This method is different from the morph way. It takes a little bit more time and have to fix here and there and keep checking to achieve best results. You can work on a model you already have or with the ones I made (yes a I know they are horrible but there are a fast model to ilustrate the theory). You can copy them to another layer so you can see the differences between this two methods. Ok, lets continue now. You need to create a skelegon (tab Create, under Elements, skelegons) and draw it from the pivot of the eyelid action (like in the morph way). You can rename the bone later. Thats the easy part. Now will have to see which points are going to be affected by this bone so in the button where was the morph map pick the W (weight map) tab, and create one (I named it skin). If you check with the Weight view, you will see that all the mesh is red, (the redder a point is, the more its affected by the bone) but since we don't want all the points to be affected, under the Map tab, General, in Set Map Value give a 0 (zero) value to all the points. Now we'll need to give the eyelid a gradient of affected points. Put your hand off the mouse and keboard, take the time to blink slowly and study your eye, done? You see (ha ha maybe you feel, it's hard to see with your eyes closed) that the upper part of the eyelid move less and the lower part (near the eyelash) needs to move more? The lower points need more movement, so what do they need? To be more redder! Thats right. And the upper points? So set the value of each point accordingly. After this, save your work and Send it to layout. In this case we are going to convert this skelegon into bone in the Items tab, Add, Bones, Convert skelegons to bone (remember the skelegon must be in the same layer). Now open the properties of the bone and in the weight map add the one we did early (mine is called skin). In the picture shown is the setting I used. I was thinking not to show them to force people to play and experiment different stuff but... Now you can rotate the eyelid as open and close. To animate the lower eyelid (the one I didn't model) you can use the same techniques. Animating Now that you have the blink setup done, open the graph editor, (for this part it doesn't matter which way you did it) and I'll show you how to set up a basic timing for the animation. Yours will depend on whether you are doing some cartoon project or a realistic one. You need to add 4 more keyframes (for total of 5) and put them the same way is in this picture: I used the morph techinque for this example. <table align="center" border="1" cellpadding="5" cellspacing="0"> <tr> Key Frame Value </tr><tr> <td>1 </td> <td>1 </td> <td>close </td> </tr><tr> <td>2 </td> <td>10 </td> <td>open </td> </tr><tr> <td>3 </td> <td>16 </td> <td>close </td> </tr><tr> <td>4 </td> <td>20-25 </td> <td>open </td> </tr></table> To the last key add a post behavior "repeat" 20-25 is because this time the eye is open. You are not opening and closing your eye all the time: you leave the eye open some time and when the eye needs lubrication we close the eyelid and reopen it. |