Need help with a weird rig

SideEffect

I've never done anything like this before and I feel like I might be going in the wrong direction with this. I'd like to hear what you guys think.

I'm setting up a rig for a HL2 version of the old HoundEye. The eyes are actual geometry now so it requires geometry for the eyelid instead of just a texture.
The eyelid expands and contracts to form a little hole at the center.

This is what I'm thinkin for a rig.


The yellow circles are the bones. And the red untextured geometry is the eyelid.
I could really use some suggestions on this one, I haven't done much rigging in the past other than regular biped type of stuff.

e_x

If you are using 3ds max, you can setup a Reaction Manager (not to be confused with reactor, the physics system). Look at the tutorials that come with max for some tutorials on how to go about it. I tried looking for some on the web, but can't find any free ones (I also didn't look that hard....)

What I would do is create four dummies at the corners of the eyelid, and then a fifth dummy that is the parent of them, probably in the middle of everything. I would setup the reaction to move the dummies back and forth, and thus make him blink. You can also put a slider on the parent bone to control the reaction and give you something to keyframe.

The cool thing about the reaction manager is you can key it on more then one axis, which is probably what you want so the lid follows the contour of the model. You would want to hide the eyelid dummies at this point and only have the parent dummy visible. I'd also lock it down so you don't accidently key it.

If you don't understand any of this, I can maybe find some time to write up a little walkthrough for what you want.

SideEffect

That sounds cool but I don't see this anywhere. Is this a new feature in 3D Studio Max 7 or is it also in earlier versions?

Snowfly

My cheap hack approach to rigging that up would be to set the eye bones a little farther back down the body of the creature, so they rotate along the surface of the eye with a "flatter" arc. You might even have to move them outside the surface of the mesh a little.

Try it this way if you'd rather use basic rotations to animate instead of translations like e_x is suggesting.

Keg

I'd say use hl2's facial animation setup. just make a couple poses for the eyes and setup through hl2's face poser or what not. havn't played around with hl2 much modding wise yet

e_x

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That sounds cool but I don't see this anywhere. Is this a new feature in 3D Studio Max 7 or is it also in earlier versions?

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I think the Reaction Manager is a max 7 feature only. You might be able to get simular results keyfrmaing it by hand though. Just a lot more work.

pyromania

Using bones could get really complicated. What about just faking it. Have the lid geometry just move forward through the eye. If the lid and the eye have different curvatures the lid will look like its blinking. The only problem you might have is Z fighting. I'm not sure how well HL2 handles overlapping polys.



This sphere just moves up and down through the eye geometry.

Snowfly

well, that's got to be the ugliest method suggested so far, for one thing the texture will give away the fact that you're cutting the objects into each other. Plus you'd have to have a pretty high resolution mesh for the faces to overlap gracefully.

Blend shapes or a rig, definitely.

MoP

I'd go with Snowfly's method of 4 bones with the pivots far back, then link those up to a slider for ease of control.

Keg

create a couple poses. one for the eye open all the way, one for a horizontal slit, one for a vertical slit and lastly one with the eye closed. read up on exporting poses for hl2 models. then use face poser which is available through the sdk option in steam. if you need help go to http://collective.valve-erc.com

sure bones are the easier route, but personally I'd say take the time and learn a little about poses and blend shapes as it'll start becoming more common.

monster

Call me old fashioned, but I would probably just put one bone in the middle and use the scale to to animate the lid. You might need to push it out a little too.

With proper skin weighting it'll look fine. Blinks are pretty quick action anyway.

Steve Schulze

Why not just animate the texture? Should be the simplest way to do it. Just animate the geometry using as many bones, splines, polygons as you like, render it out and then paste the animation onto the simplified face. Bingo bango, you've saved yourself a bunch of polys and a lot of mucking about. You could even alpha map the animation so that it just showed the eyelid itself if you wanted to have geometry for the compound eyes behind.

Erol

Could also use an FFD Cyl to deform the lid. Dunno if it's supported to export to HL2, tho.

Rakile

Half life 2 supports vertex animation, so perhaps the FFD cylinder would work. You could also animate the eyelid by pulling the verts to the right position, but that would be more of a last resort. Bones could be tricky, and the morph modifier in max would basically be the same as animating the verts anyways. That's all I can really think of. Good luck.