Is there any proper way to rig those flat cartoon eyelids in 3DS Max?

Unc1e

Greetings guys! 

Here's cartoon character's (cat) head, i need to make and rig eyelids for it, so it could blink and show various emotions like anger, sadness, suspiciosness etc, as it is drawn on attached pictures. Character's face contains few layers placed one behind another: face with eye holes, pupils, and eye whites for pupils to slide over their surface. So i want to place eyelids between face and pupils planes so they could cover eyes. I tried various eyelids shapes and faced few problems: 

• Space between face plane's edge and eye holes edge is too small to use simple rectangle sliding under the face plane, it's corners sticks out of the face edges (on the pic). 

• When half-circle shape is used with straight edge attached to to the bone, situation with sticking out corners repeats when eyes fully opened (on the pic). 

Actually i could rig eye holes on the face plane themselves to do eyelids functions but there's certain style to follow, another characters eyelids have straight edges (their face constructions allows using simple rectangles to make eyelids). 

I know here is a lot of experienced professionals on this forum and i count on your help very much, because it seems there's no way for me to figure out how to do it on my own. So please give me some advice or a few.

PolyHertz

You could just have floating planes over the face and draw different frames of animation for those. Here's a quick example:

Unc1e

PolyHertz said:

You could just have floating planes over the face and draw different frames of animation for those. 

That's pretty nice, thanks bro! But i need to control pupils by lookat constraint (i was earlier explained on how to do that) and with animation drawn i wouldn't be able to do that. Also i predict difficulties on animation synchronisation later in Unity. But i much appreciate your advice anyway!

Unc1e

Maybe preventing polygons from flipping will do the trick? Then eyelids geometry will shrink into thin lines and wouldn't stick out of the head's geometry as on attached picture. Is there any way to implement such kind of magic?

RN

You only need one eyelid expression to get the others, based on your design, which would be the "eyelid closed" shape. The sadness and anger eyelid shapes are halfway "eyelid closed" shapes, rotated around the center of the eyes. 

I would start from a half eye "ring" geometry, and then make the inner rim of that ring go down to form a straight edge that closes half of the eye. This is the eyelid closed shape, you can store it in a blendshape.
Your eyes are symmetrical, so you can duplicate and mirror that half eyelid mesh to get the bottom eyelid. When both of the "eyelid closed" shapes are at 100% strength, the entire eye is closed. You can then play with that strength to get some acting.



This is based on what Brian Tindall explains, you can find some of his videos in here: https://vimeo.com/205961282

Unc1e

RN said:

You only need one eyelid expression to get the others, based on your design, which would be the "eyelid closed" shape. The sadness and anger eyelid shapes are halfway "eyelid closed" shapes, rotated around the center of the eyes. 

What a nice method! Big thanks for advice friend! The design of another character assumes that the eyelid inner lines remain straight all the way until closed (head geometry allows using simple rectangles for eyelids geometry), so i was searching for the way to reproduce that in this case somehow. But it is not always possible to find absolutely suitable solution, maybe i should roconsider another character design instead...