Facial Motion and Controls - Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish - page 184

previously presented and the creative use
of a Lattice object.
When creating oddly shaped eyes, it is best
to create them as normal spheres and posi-
tion them in the nonstandard socket. In
Figure 10.41, a spherical eye has been placed
where the properly shaped eye should
go, even though it obviously does not fi t.

Even though the eye doesn't fi t, you
proceed with rigging as in the previous
example.

Figure 10.41 Placing the round eye in the oval eye socket

When you have the eyes rotating to fol-
low the sight target, it's time to squash
them!

Add a lattice object, scaling and trans-
forming it so that its outer boundaries
closely match those of the eyeball. A con-
fi guration like the one in Figure 10.42
will work. Bind the lattice to the eye by
adding a Lattice modifi er to the eye-
ball. Then alter the lattice in Edit mode
until the shape of the eyeball conforms to
the shape of the eye socket. Figure 10.43
shows the result.

Figure 10.42 An eyeball with an undeformed lattice surrounding it

The fi nal step is to make the lattice a child
of the same bone (probably the main head
bone) that the sight target and sight line
are children of.

Now when you move the sight target,
the eyes “rotate” but within the confi nes
of the deformed shape. Even more con-
trol can be enjoyed by making the Lattice
affect a vertex group around the eye of the
main mesh. This way the Lattice itself can
be animated for a nice squash and stretch
effect on both the eyeball and eyelids
together. It's lattice-based eye-squishing
magic! Figure 10.43 The lattice is deformed, and along with it, the eye