placing eyes on a character.

[flyboy]

Hello at Kurv. I have begun to work on human character heads. I make a head and delete to polys for the eye sockets. ThenI make eyes for them really just spheres or ellipses approx. the size of the empty socket. How do I get the eyes to perfectly allign with the socket so that there are no empty gaps arround the sockets and the eyes do not appear to be sticking out of the mesha or bulging.How do you get the curvature of the eye surface to correctly match up with the curvature of the border of the empty socket.I mean it seems extremly tedious to try to line up the eyes correctly with a background layer of the head mesh which is exactly what I have been doing.But they dont look quite right. And you must keep the eyes seperate from the sockets to be able to later animate or morph them right? . I know that I read some where in one of my LW books or saw on a video a method for doing this based on a snap tool that was simple but I cant referance it now. It might have been William Proton V. or Larry S. Does anyone have a method they use that they could describe that is quick and accurate. I thought there must be a snap tool for alligning this sort of thing but after studing the Manual and working with the translate tools I couldnt find a way to do it. Thanks for the help. Flyboy

[richdj]

OK, not going to answer this completely, but hopefully it'll help...

You want to keep the eyes round, this will make animation easier (stick with bones rather than morphs as morphs are linear)... The sockets should have a roundish (matching the eye) look to them.. However, they do not need to be perfect. because the eye has it's eye lids (fatty ish), you can easily use that to your favour.. Also, if you think of the eye socket as a mouth (for modeling only) you can add a few polys backwards which are then seen as the red parts of the eye, therefore there are no holes...

Have a look at the attached image.. Hopefully this will help, if not let me know and I'll re-write it...

http://www.3dthunder.com/eye.jpg

Rich

[richdj]

The red part just goes backwards and is then closed off as a poly.. so no matter what I do with the eyelid, it will always have the red part to make it look right...

Rich

[Pablogrca]

I use two technics to model a head but when I model it wether it be human, alien, or animal I always start with the eye. Anyway, depending if you want it low or high poly I usually have the sphere in a background layer and then lay out my spline and move the points around to match the shape of the sphere. Then extend points out to shape the eye lid. I don't make sockets for the eye because they're useless polys to me, I mean you can't see them so why make them. If you have the points close enough to the eye when you render the shadows will hide it and make it look normal. But if you really want to add the socket. Select the first points you made and extend them back into the head 1 or 2 times and scale them up to form the eye socket but keep the points within the sphere to help hide any light or background colors of your scene from showing through. As Rich said, use bones because morphs are linear. To animate the eyes put each eye in it's own layer, then in Layout you'll have to move the piviot points to move them realisticly. Just another way of doing it. Hope this helps if not let us know. :)