Blender For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Practical Example: Building and Animating a Simple Eye Rig

In this quick example, you build a simple rig for controlling eyes and ultimately animating them.

Before getting started, I should note that while the eye rig you have at the end of this section works well, I don't recommend that you use this exact rig in a full character without some modifications. The modifications aren't too drastic; mostly you need to replace the Empties in this rig with bones in an armature. I go over using bones in more detail in Chapter 11. In the meantime, work your way through this example, and you'll be much better prepared when you get into more complex rigs.

Creating your rig

If you worked through the practical examples in previous chapters of this book, you should have a nice, textured eyeball. If you haven't worked through those examples, that's okay, too. I provide an eye model for you to work with on this book's companion DVD and Web site.

Appending an eye

This practical example starts off a bit differently from the previous ones in this book. Instead of opening the existing model .blend and working directly in that file, you start this project from the default startup scene (Ctrl+N) and append your eye model. To do so, use the following steps:

1. Open Blender or load Blender's default scene (Ctrl+N) and delete the default cube (X or Delete).

   All that's left in your scene now is the camera ...