Cartoony Eyes - MAX?

FAT_CAP

Im in the middle of building a high poly, cartoony character at the minute but am stuck on how to approach the eyes/ eyelids and their rotation.

The eye shape is roughly oval, and not spherical, so any rotation would pop the eyes out of the socket. In Ye Olde days I used Softimage 3d in which you could attach the same "lattice (FFD BOX in MAX) to multiple objects and could have a spherical eyeball with half spheres for the upper and lowe lid and a squashed sphere for the pupil- with the lattice then deforming the set of objects into an oval shape. When rotating any object, the centre of rotation would be that of the sphere but the lattice would keep the oval shape.

I tried a similar thing in MAX by applying an FFD modifier to the eyeball model then copying this onto the hemisphere eyelid models but this doesn't work.

Any ideas?

Noren

If you apply the ffd to eye and lids at the same time it should work. You also could try a ffd-spacewarp.
If you just copy a ffd it will adapt it's positition and rotation according to the new objects pivot.

FAT_CAP

Ahah - thanks for the quick reply! The FFD Spacewarp works perfectly so far - applying the FFD to both objects at the same time doesn't work as the whole objects and FFD rotates in object mode or the eyelid rotates around its own centre point not the object pivot if in element mode.

Thanks again for the quick reply!

aesir

Yea, the spacewarp was the thing to do for non sphereical eyes.

For my film, Im keeping all the eyes as spheres. The eyelids jut out a bit over the eyes for space with morphs so it doesnt clip straight through.

Also, a tip for coolness. Weight a tiny bit of the mesh around the eyes to the eyeballs themselves. That'll make it look like the skin moves as the eye rotates. Its cool looking.