topic Re: Eye aim constrain with rigged mesh in Maya Animation and Rigging Forum

Eye aim constrain with rigged mesh

kochamklauny2DWTG — Tue, 07 Aug 2018 17:01:32 GMT

Hi. I have a problem with my eyes movement on a rigged mesh. I've set an aim constrain for each of my eyes, then parented it to the neck joint of my head. I also had to center pivot for my eyes, so they rotate in a right way. So far it seems to work well:

If I move my rigged neck, eyes seem to follow correctly:

The problem starts, when I try to rotate them after changing my head's position:

I've digged through lots of threads and tutorials, but haven't find any answer to solve my problem, and without correct eye movement I'm unable to proceed with my animation.

Please, help.

Re: Eye aim constrain with rigged mesh

kochamklauny2DWTG — Sun, 23 Sep 2018 23:38:00 GMT

Bump, still don't know how to solve the problem.

Re: Eye aim constrain with rigged mesh

Anonymous — Mon, 24 Sep 2018 18:32:15 GMT

Hey @kochamklauny2DWTG

Honestly best way to truly dig deep into the problem is if you attach the scene file itself to take a look at (:

Re: Eye aim constrain with rigged mesh

dinofiguera — Fri, 28 Sep 2018 11:03:10 GMT

You need to have two joints at the center of the eyes, parented to the head joint.

Then you have to skin your eyes to those joints.
Then you need to aim constraint the eye joints to the individual eye controllers.
Cheers

Re: Eye aim constrain with rigged mesh

Anonymous — Sun, 30 Sep 2018 03:44:51 GMT

Yes this is a common problem. First unbind the skincluster then parent the eyes with the head joint not neck joint and apply the skincluster also apply the aim constraints to the eyes. Still if your problem is not resolved please upload your scene file here.

Re: Eye aim constrain with rigged mesh

aligillies — Thu, 09 Apr 2020 08:10:23 GMT

Hi All,

I'm having exactly this problem, In an emtpy scene with eyeballs I can attach aim constraints for eyeballs no problem, but as soon as I start trying to rig the character, I can no longer get the eyes to attach to the aim constraint - I am a terrible rigger, any help anyone could offer would be much appreciated... I've attached the scene in case anyone wants to take a look, its a cartoony Kea (NZ Bird) based on a puppet. Still a work in progress, been following tutorials on x-gen which is awesome! Thought I'd use this lock down time to learn something new, but Im tearing my hair out trying to get the eyes to aim but I'd love to be able to animate him.

Thanks

-Al

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mb-xU6GUdS0RQn7xibhrsHVCtFZUuoWp/view?usp=sharing

For some reason the .ma wont attach to the post either its only 30 mb, beginning to think it might be cursed!

Re: Eye aim constrain with rigged mesh

stephenkmann — Thu, 09 Apr 2020 20:01:07 GMT

Hey Aligillies,

I rarely use HIK, like basically never.

but I downloaded your rig and did a quick look thru,

I decided to record my looking into it , and thought it would help

https://youtu.be/7Iloyj34ros

good luck. and hope this helps

-=s

Re: Eye aim constrain with rigged mesh

aligillies — Thu, 09 Apr 2020 22:46:50 GMT

Hi Stephen,

You are a scholar and a gentleman! Thank you so much! That's awesome to see - I'll have to watch you video about 5 times to get it through my thick head. But at least there's light at the end of the tunnel! Looks awesome and yes I'll start using proper naming, but had deleted and tried many times over to get it working, clearly just making a bigger mess of it.

Thanks heaps

-Al

Is that script for smoothing weights this one:

https://github.com/bungnoid/glTools/blob/master/tools/smoothWeights.py

Re: Eye aim constrain with rigged mesh

stephenkmann — Fri, 10 Apr 2020 14:47:01 GMT

I'm not familiar with that one.

but I use a variation of the smoothFlood4 script. ( downloadable from highend3d.com..usually)

It just selects all joints and smooths them.

It's like 10 lines of code.