Pupils

[Evil Sock Pupet]

I made up this way of making your charectors look where you want them to look.

When you are desighning the layers of the charector make a layer called "Pupils" click on that layer and draw pupils inside the eyes of your charector.

move the pupils in the derection of where you want your charector to look (so long as you stay inside the the eyes) when you start moveing the timeline.

have fun

[7feet]

I always have pupils in my characters in Moho, even back to the olden days. I need 'em. But I tend more towards putting them in the're own layer. Probably a Switch layer so I can lay eyelids on top of them, but even if it's a Group layer, I tend to make the basic eye shape as a mask, and then have that mask the pupils. Then you can have the character look pretty hard in any direction and not have them ever appear at all outside the shape of the eye. If it's really cartoony, I may not use the mask and do it manual, but not often. Setting an eyline is key, whatever method you use.

One thing Ive been doing lately that can make things quicker is to have the eyes inside a separate bone layer for the head, attached to the main skeleton. Inside the "head" bone layer is the head, with everythng set to be immune to masking except the eye shape (the mask) and the pupils (masked). Make a bone that is the child of the main head bone (outside the head, it makes things easier) and bind the points of the pupils to this bone. When you animate, you can grab that bone (its easy, 'cuz its just floating in space) and use the Translate Bone tool to make the pupils move. Works good and its easy to tweak when you are animating.

[gavi dvan]

My personal method:

Have a group layer, "eyes", set masking to "hide all".

Within this, a layer "eyeballs", which is just the white part of the eyes, set masking to "add to mask".

Above the eyeballs layer, a layer "pupils". Now you can move your pupils around and they will stay inside your eyeballs, which is generally considered a good thing.

And above the pupils layer, a layer "eyelids", made of a 8 pointed shape.



The points in the middle of the eyes, the red points in these pics, are set to maximum curvature, and you can move those around to make your eyelid effect.

A couple of other ideas with this method
- If you want you could make two of these eyelid shapes, one for the bottom and one for the top.
- Colour the eyelids a different colour, like purple or something, for chicks with make-up.
- You could possibly attach eyelashes to the eyelids, haven't experimented with this yet.

[Rasheed]

gavi dvan, I like your technique! It is simple and effective. If you use one or more eyesets more than once, putting those in a switch layer would save even more time.

For putting eyelashes on the eyelids, you could use Barry Baker's technique for eyelashes, which uses two brushes (one for left and one for right) he made especially for that purpose and you can download from his website.

[myles]

Hey, I like that curvature trick! Thank you!

I've been using a similar setup with just a sliding roughly rectangular shape for the eyelids, but your eyelids look much nicer.

Here's a tip for eyebows: if you attach a "skin flap" to the top of your character's eyebrows, you can drag the eyebrows down without risk of exposing the white of the eyes above them.



Regards, Myles.

[7feet]

I most often make my eyelids (really variations on the eyeshape) as switch layers. Every shape I can think of, and with interpolation on I can get an awful lot of mileage. As usual with Moho, more time rigging but the animation is almost effortless.

[Therm0s]

I was going to start my own thread, but this seems a good place to ask about a problem.

Is it possible to exclude an outline from a mask? I have an eye shape using variable line widths, and use this to mask a pupil layer, but the pupil extends "over" the outline as well as the fill of the mask.

An example:



Any ideas?



BTW:

Thanks to Gavi Dvan for the great "eyelids" method. I'm sure this will come in extremely handy in the future. I'm still new to Moho, but always eager for tips!

[myles]

No current easy solution, but a couple of workarounds.

One possible workaround is to duplicate the mask layer, put it above the pupil, and delete the fill but leave the outline.
If you don't animate the eye shape (with point movement) that's all that's needed. If you animate the eye shape just duplicate it after all your animation, so you also duplicate the animation keyframes for the layer.

Another possible workaround is to create the outline as a separate unmasked layer beneath the eye mask, possibly as a complete black eye shape, so you just tweak the shape of the eye or the black area rather than tweaking outline width. Drawback: if the eye shape is animated, you will probably have to animate both the black and white areas.

--eye group for masking
----pupil layer (masked)
----white area (as mask)
----black area/outline (not masked)

The only other workaround I know of, using layer shadow as an outline, means no separate animation or layer for the outline, but doesn't work with variable width lines.

Regards, Myles.

[heyvern]

When I first started dealing with eyes and eye holes on a face... I would create the face with the holes "built in" without masking (compound shape?) and place the eyeballs underneath.

However since then I like to use layers and shapes for subtle soft shading over the face...

... this of course puts the shading over the eyes... ick.

Now since discovering that switch slave script (thanks 7feet) I make the eye "holes" a mask in a switch layer and can easily link that to another switch layer for eyelids and black lines for the eye... etc. Never have to worry about it. Almost like having all that in one switch layer.

Since the eye hole/s are at the bottom in a switch and a mask they mask out all of the shading and don't cover up the eye balls/iris which are under the eye hole mask switch group.

Occasionally depending on the character I have to incorporate a very simple mask (just a box usually) for the eye balls so they don't "stick out" outside of the face when moved.

---------

I am currently working on a project that has a more complex bone rig for the face than the body. Lots of bones to control eyes, eyebrows, mouth, chin etc. Plus tons of layers for shading. The eye hole mask switch layer works PERFECTLY for this... makes it very simple to manage the eyes.

-Vern