Cinema 4D Eyeballs
This is a collection of tips for cartoon eyeballs collected over the years. They are all contained in this file (Eyeballs.zip) with descriptions about the important stuff on this page. I'm assuming you know the basics of cinema 4d so I'm not going to go over all the steps.
The first thing you should do is download the file and render the movie so you can see the final effects. Then read along, with the scene file open in cinema 4d.
(on the left)
This is my basic setup. It starts with a null object at the top of the hierarchy which makes aiming and placing the eyeballs easy. This null is only used for translations (X, Y and Z moves) and holding all the parts together.
Next in the hierarchy is "90 null" named for the 90 degrees I've rotated the sphere primitive to make it's axis line up with the eyeballs line of sight as it targets the "Fly" (more on that later). If you keep the pupil at the poles of the sphere primitive you can minimize the artifacts possible from the pupil interacting with the eyeball. "90 null" is the null that will be rotated to aim the eyeballs, this keeps positioning data off the root null, keeping things tidy and allowing simple repositioning of the eyes with out interfering with anything else.
In Eye 1 the pupil is a simple texture flat mapped to the side of the eye. Here I used the gradient shader but a texture map could work just as well though if you get too fancy you'll run into the limitations of flat mapping. You change the size of the pupil by animating the textures placement on the eyeball, sliding it forward or back.
For an eyelid, a sphere primitive set to Hemisphere is a quick solution. The eyeball has a radius of 100 so I set the eyelid radius to 102 so it surrounds the eye and has enough distance from the eyeball so we don't see artifacts from the polygons interacting. In c4d the default segment setting for a sphere is 24, up close that shows the polygons so to smooth things out all spheres in this project have segments set to 60. Since most cartoon characters have close ups 60 is a good setting.
(on the right)
This is mostly Eye 1 with a few changes. I've used another sphere for the pupil instead of a texture, it's scaled down a bit smaller than the eyeball and slid towards the line of sight until it pops out a bit. Animating this distance will change the pupil size. This style of pupil will give a bit of a bump for the lense and makes some texturing of the pupil simpler.
Also added a new style of eyelid that opens and closes. You can use the hemisphere eyelids above and have independently controllable upper and lower eyelids. Or you can get a bit fancy and use a Lathe NURBS with a semicircle spline and play with the settings using less than 360 degrees of rotation like in Eye 2.
Both eyes have an FFD deformer and by animating it's points you can change the shape of your eyes and make them more expressive. In cartoons odd egg shaped eyes are common but if you're going for realism stick with spheres.
When you have eyes it's nice if they look at something instead of just staring out into space. A "Fly" is a simple object that the eyes always look at which can be animated independently of the character and their eyes giving a very real appearance. in this case a small red cube. It is usually set to be visible in the Editor and invisible in the final render but for the test movie you made earlier I let it render so we can see what's going on.
OK, that's it. Take apart the file and figure out what's going on and try to adapt the techniques to what you make.
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