Reptile Eyes - Rigging Eyes revisited.

Recently i had the opportunity to work on some large creatures for a VFX style characters. I was tasked to come up with problem solving two rigging conundrums.

The first being a way to bulging a pupil though the skin. second to get the secondary tear duct to move when rotating both the eye and eyelids. I will be explaining the first problem.

Its worth noting In order to achieve this convincingly you need a fairly dense resolution in model to get the best results as shown above.

The other thing needed is a love for deformers, As you know me i love all of Maya bag of tricks. In this demonstration i was able to achieve this with the Sculpt deformer. A bit like a Soft Mod this deformer mainly a modelling tool in the begging is used to achieve bulging in a model it can also give a skin slide type look. I was able to get this fairly quick using a sculpt deformer parentConstrained to the end of a pupil geo. The skinning i used is fairly simple:

Next you can place a Sculpt at the end of the pupil model.

Somewhere here will do...

Settings I used are:

In order to scale position of the sculpt i scale constrained the Sculpt Deformer to the pupil joint. its a single pupil joint skinned to the eyeball. nothing fancy.

Simples...

And there you have it, a simple solution for eye bulging that is ideal for a realistic style creature.

If you have any question feel free to reach out. As usual happy rigging. Jase