Post 40 - Eye brow set up

The eye brows have been a little bit trickier to rig. With the help of the Paul Neale rigging DVD set, I was able to do this and to understand the process. Each motion of the eye brow has been created out of morph targets (and again , using the mirror morph target work around, these have been mirrored for the other side also). So the morph targets for each brow are:


Up
Outer corner, Middle, Inner corner
Down
Outer corner, Middle, Inner corner


This is also done using the Reaction Manager. The main difference with the eye brows is that ideally, the controller should be able to move the eye brows using both the slider's X and Y directions to get full motion of the corners of the eye brows. However, the problem is that whilst each morph target needs the local Y (up/down) axis, the local X (left/right) control would do nothing as the brow's channel has already been used. The way to do this is to add a second euler layer (bezier float). So when using reaction Manager, the Y axis should influence an up and down position, but the X axis should influence the outer and inner morph targets.

So, this requires a 'counter reaction'. When the controller is in the bottom left corner, the Y axis has full influence over all of the 'down' morph targets. But the second layer controlled by the X would have a series of counters, so the outer would have 0% influence, the middle would have -50% and the inner would -100%. Its a bit confusing until you actually do it, but essentially the result is what appears to be a smooth controller which seamlessly blends all the morph targets together as they are constantly influencing and counter influencing to get the correct kind of look.


I've recorded a video showing the results of this where I try to highlight what is happening in the scene.




Eye brow demo clip - LINK