Learning Blender: A Hands-On Guide to Creating 3D Animated Characters

Using Lattices to Deform the Eyeballs

Now you have one eyeball, but it’s completely round and in the reference designs for Jim, the eyes are more oval. Fortunately, Blender has a tool called Lattice that lets you deform geometry and then it will maintain that deformation when you rotate the geometry, which is exactly what you need for the eyeballs. You could just go ahead and scale the eye on the Y-axis to make it flatter, but when you rotate it to look at something, it won’t fit the eye socket. Figure 7.5 shows the effects of the Lattice modifier.

Figure 7.5 A lattice (left) and how it affects the eyeball (right)

Follow these steps to apply ...