It wasn't my original proposal, but it hadn't occurred to me that eyes are extremely important in a head rig. Using the DVD rigging series by Paul Neale (of which has been a tremendous help so far) I quickly picked up how to model a rig a pair of eyes. The eye (which when finished is simply duplicated) consists of two spheres: The eye and the lens, which engulfs the eye. The pupil and iris of the eye is scaled back so that it is flat (as eyes are in real life) Then a multiple texturing material was applied allowing the pupil, iris and body of the eye to be appropriate colours. I then made a spline controller and applied a look at constraint on the eyes so that they follow the controller. I made separate controller for each eye and parented them the the main one (main one moves both eyes, individual ones move the corresponding eye). Then, in order to attach them to the head correctly, a point helper was aligned to the eye and the eye was linked top the helper. The helper was then linked to the head. This way, the linking is not done directly onto the geometry. In avoiding direct linking, alterations can be made without upsetting the connections (i.e. If you needed to change the eyes, you could unlink from the point helper, alter them, and them reattach).
In order to control the pupil dilation, an XForm modifier was placed on the vertices which made up the pupil. A bounding box was then provided. Then by creating custom attribute on the eye controllers and a 'float expression', the scale of the pupil (XForm modifier) could be manipulated by a slider attribute.
This was fairly straight forward but would prefer to avoid scripting if possible. I do understand it but feel that it is still a case of 'monkey see, monkey do'. I should point out that I have also added a set of teeth and a tongue (as seen in the clip below). The top set of teeth were linked to the head and the bottom set of teeth plus tongue to the jaw
Pupil Manipulation clip - LINK
Eye Manipulation clip - LINK
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