[0:05]Hi everybody, welcome to this channel. My name is Arman. I animate to the characters using spine. In this video, I'll be rigging an eye in a complex way and will help you better understand when and how complex you want to rig an eye.
[0:18]I plan to release this video as instant premiere, so we can watch it together at the same time. And when premiere ends, you should automatically be led to the live stream where we will be rigging a new eye from scratch, so you can see the full process and ask your questions.
[0:33]Cool. Let's get started. Check it out. We have a cute cat drawn by my friend Va Aban. I will put the link to his portfolio in the description.
[0:43]Before starting, let's divide rigging into three sections: blinking, looking around, and working combined with a face rig controller. Today we will be rigging for first two, for third one, you can watch another video. I will put the link on the screen.
[0:56]Now, let's name the cat Pizo, and do some thinking whether we need to rig the eyes or not.
[1:06]We need to see if Pizo appears on screen big, or maybe it's an important character, perhaps a tutorial guide.
[1:17]Check if Pizo appears many times throughout progression of the game, or maybe it interacts with an environment by looking at different characters or objects.
[1:30]If none of above is the case for you, you may be just need to draw some extra states like closed, smiling, even looking up or down states, and switch them in animation without any rig at all.
[1:44]For example, I animate monster Legend characters using true states for eyes, opened and closed. And they are pretty much important characters and appear many times throughout the game and even big enough for me to do the rigging.
[2:03]But they have thousands of monsters in the game, so the process got optimized time-wise, since the rigging the eyes, uh, takes solid portion of the total rigging. So make sure the decision you do is well.
[2:17]Okay, let's do the rigging. We will be starting from blinking functionality. Let's see how the layering was done for Pizo.
[2:29]You can see that we have shines of the eyes separated in different layers, so we can also move them with the pupils. And we have opened and closed states for the eyes.
[2:41]I would use open states when eyes are opened if they are a little bit beautiful than this. But I think this state I can achieve also with closed states by deforming and binding the mesh to the bones.
[2:56]Sometimes characters come with bottom eyelid like this guy, and it helps us to do more realistic look and achieve more emotions. But don't worry, we can also go without bottom eyelid and rig just top one.
[3:14]In our case, we will be throwing this open state, since they are simple and we can achieve similar look by just rigging the closed state. So let's open closed state.
[3:32]And next thing, I would go and mesh the eyelid. I will be rigging one eye, and the next eye you can do yourself, since I'm going to share this project and you can play with it.
[3:44]But I am now I'm going to speed up and mesh this eyelid. I will be doing it detailed to be able to open it smoothly. Let's see it.
[4:09]Now that I have it meshed, I will be needing to add a bone and bind the mesh to it so that bone can control open and close of the eye.
[4:19]Before that, you need to make sure that all eye parts are in one bone. I will be calling it eye root, and make sure that everything is inside is isolated.
[4:30]Later, with face tree, you will just need to move this bone by constraining it to the face controller.
[4:40]Okay, let's create a bone. Let's select this as a parent and create a bone. For after that, I will select the mesh, bind it to root bone and eyelid bone.
[4:55]And let's give it all back to the root. Now with add brush tool, with feather 100% and maybe a little less size, we can start pushing it.
[5:07]But before that, we need to move it simulating the already open state. But this needs to happen after we bind it.
[5:17]So the mesh knows that initial binding pose the bone was here, so now it moved here. If we now give it the value to this bone, it will the the points will move.
[5:37]After basic waiting, we will go and do them some polishing with direct mode. I will speed up this process.
[6:06]Now, I have it bound. I will maybe do some adjustments here at this age by adding some vertices and polishing the bindings.
[6:17]But now I need to compare with the original design. Let's open it and see if our rig allows us the same state.
[6:31]I see something comes out from here, so I will be definitely fixing it. As well I will smooth out these sections.
[7:03]Okay, I think I'm happy with the result. You can go and smooth even more, but this is working for me. I can achieve nice smooth blinking with this bone.
[7:16]Remember that you can also do rotations for this bone, and also scaling.
[7:27]Okay, now we have the blinking. Next, we will be needing to do to rig the pupil to achieve the looking functionality. Let's see how we do that.
[7:37]Before rigging, make sure that the face has carved out windows for eyes that will cover the unnecessary part of the eyes.
[7:45]You can also go with clipping, but I I wouldn't suggest it if you can avoid it, just do it. It is performance heavy.
[7:54]So, to do the rig for pupil, I will need all the the setup inside and another container bone. For that, I will select I root bone. Create that bone.
[8:06]This will contain all the IP and target, etc. So, now I will create another bone. This will be our IK. And immediately we can create a target for it.
[8:24]And right away just hit compress. So it compresses but not stretches. This will give us a nice functionality to move it in a circle and you can see that radius is remaining untouched while we can move and move inside.
[8:44]So now we need to create a pupil bone. For that, I will select the container bone with create tool just holding control. I will select the image that will immediately put it into new created bone.
[9:04]And I am going to put this bone into this arm of the IK. And maybe move it here.
[9:16]Yes. And make sure that it is on the bone and not up or down to avoid unnecessary distortions.
[9:26]Now when we move it, you can see that pup is moving in some circular way. It's not what we want right now.
[9:34]But we can tweak it very easily. Just select this bone and we need to disable rotation. So this way when we move it, it's not going to rotate.
[9:47]And uh next you can see that it gets scaled because the parent bone, this bone, gets scaled. We need to also disable that scaling inheritance.
[9:56]Cool. Now we have pupil moving perfectly. And let me demonstrate now let me actually put this target inside the container bone, and yeah, I think I have all set up inside here.
[10:10]Now when we have a circular movement, we can go with this, but sometimes when it comes to a different design where the eyes are elliptical,
[10:22]we can go and scale this on one axis, and when we move it, you can see that it moves by elliptical well.
[10:37]You can also of course, rotate it to match the the design of the character. Now let's move it back, and next we will be doing the shine.
[10:46]For that, I will go and mesh the shine, and maybe separate this section and leave other parts untoched.
[10:57]Let's bind it to this bone, container and this bone. This is our main moving bone, so we will be working with this guy.
[11:08]When we move this one, but whatever we bind or constrain, we will go and put it here. Okay, now let's adjust the weights.
[11:19]Let's first move all to the container and give a little bit to the pupil, maybe add some more values to this section.
[11:32]Okay, let's test it. Cool. I think I like it. Yeah. Now let's move it in the middle and constrain this eyelid to that bone.
[11:44]Remember I was saying that we are working with this bone when constraining, so this is that case. We need to hit much to save this distance between those two bones.
[12:00]And after that, we can specify what values we want to link to this bone and how much.
[12:10]Cool. Let's see. Let's see. Okay, I like it. I like it. Maybe a little bit less, a little bit more, but the idea you get the idea. So what we can do more is to mesh this pupil.
[12:24]And when we move to this side, it could go and squash like a ball. Seeing the similar manner. And also we could go and separate this iris. Maybe add another depth of that.
[12:38]It depends how big is your characterize and how much time you have, maybe you want to experiment by yourself. So it really depends.
[12:52]Okay, I think I will leave you here. If I did everything correct and you are watching this premiere first time with me, you should be navigated to another stream video where I will be streaming another character and doing the same rig just with another character.
[13:13]You can go and ask any questions, and it will be I think one hour long. Cool. Meet you here. Thank you.
