eye drawing problem

[basshole]

This is more of an art/aesthetic question than an ASP problem, so I hope this category's okay.

so, basically, I was trying to use the same pair of eyes in my character's frontal pose as in the 3/4 view. For some expressions, this looks okay (I have many different sets of eyes in a switch layer), and some expressions it doesn't. Here's what I mean: In this frontal picture, for instance,




You see what I call my "slightly annoyed" expression.

So if take those same eyes, and simply shift the pupils over, and use that for the 3/4 view, it looks like this:



As you can see, the "off camera" eye now looks weird compared to the eye that's toward the camera; the pupil doesn't interact with the lid in the same way, giving the expression a different feel.

My solution before was to alter the slant of the lid on the off-camera eye so that it cuts the pupil in approximately the same way, but now I find I don't like the way that looks.

I started looking at Garfield cartoons to see how Jim Davis (I think that's the cartoonist's name) handled it, but what I realized is that a) those characters have eyes that overlap, which I don't want mine to do, and b) the slant (when a character is angered in a 3/4 view) on the off-camera eye on his character ends in the middle, it's just that it's covered by the overlapping on-camera eye, making it look "correct". If I try this with my eyes, I get a weird looking lid shape on the off-camera eye.

I also tried moving the off-camera pupil toward the other pupil, instead of away from it, but then the character looks kind of cross-eyed.

I was just wondering if you guys had ideas about how to handle this. Thanks.

[mkelley]

Since all I do is the 3/4 view the only thing I can remark is the off camera eye should be redrawn -- it should be both smaller and more slanted (oblique) due to the perspective.

Even in the very cheated perspective I use (Family Guy type) this is true, and because the eye is smaller the lid and eyebrow (which are also smaller) work just fine. However, that means a completely different set of switches I suspect for your characters. The only good news is that flipped it works, so you don't have to draw two different sides.

[basshole]

that makes sense. What I meant when I said "use the same eyes" is that I copied the switch layer with the eyes and pasted it in the 3/4 skeleton (I have two completely different skeletons for the frontal and 3/4 poses of these characters).

Make the off-cam eye smaller not a big deal, I just hadn't thought of it before. All characters use the same eyes, so once I nail it, I just copy copy copy and they're all taken care of except for the woman, since she has lashes.

[slowtiger]

You just have to decide which style to use. In reality, human eyes are inside the skull, under the surface of the skin. In animation, everything's possible.

I suggest to do more sketches on paper, with at least 3 very different characters (maybe boy, girl, dog/horse) in 3 different views (front, 3/4, side) to work out how the facial features look. I have seen successful series with characters whose eyes always stay the same, no matter where the face directs to. Your character looks like it has a solid 3D geometry, so the eyes should follow the same rules as the rest of the body, which means perspective distortion when seen from the side.

[basshole]

I appreciate the compliment. Nothing about my characters is solid, though. I'm going for "passable" at this point. I think I've got it, though. I will post a pic when I'm done messin' around. Who would've thought that 2D animation would take WAY longer than claymation?

[slowtiger]

Who would've thought that 2D animation would take WAY longer than claymation?

It only looks like that because you're still in the rigging phase of the project. Once your character is set up, animation is easy and fast and will beat claymation.

[basshole]

That's what I'm hoping. However, I still expect this to take at least a year and a half for what will be a twelve minute short. I was able to finish my claymation short (probably about 3-4 minutes of total animation) in four months.

[basshole]

OK, here's what I have come up with. Using the same expression as I posted before, this is new version:




I forshortened and shrank the off camera eye a little bit. The slant of the lid may only be slightly different from the on camera eye (or maybe it isn't; it's very hard to tell by eye), but it looks ok to me. The pupil is slightly elevated compared to the on-camera pupil, but the size is the same (two differently sized pupils didn't look right, looked like the character was on drugs or something). The brow is forshortened/shrunken also, and because I grabbed the brow and eye in the same selection when I "resized the points", the brow is a little closer to the off-camera eye than the on camera brow is to its eye.

The whole thing definitely looks more "right" to me, and a little more three-dimensional to boot. I also fixed that broken curve that was present in all the brows.

By the way, it's funny you mention family guy. I watched it last night after reading the first response to my original post, and the eyes look to be of identical size and shape in the 3/4 view, unless the differences are so small that you can only tell on a freeze frame.

I take back some of what I said earlier--there is an attempt to match the proportions and dimensions of the front view to the side view. The heights of all the different body parts are easy to line up, but the interpolation of width when the body is turned is tough for me, so I refer to my 3D model from "makehuman" (which you guys turned me on to) as well as various drawings, and just instinct as to what "looks right".

[mkelley]

Trust me -- on Family Guy the eyes are definitely sized much the same way you've ended up doing (which looks great, BTW).

I know because I've made it my mission to do FG/American Dad type animation and since I really can't draw I base all my characters on stills from those shows. I've studied their character design very very closely (some might say *too* closely :>) and made my own characters to their specifications.

It may not show because the characters aren't in extreme closeups like yours (or at least very rarely) but if you take a still from the show and blow it up the proportions are almost exactly what you've done.

I've learned so much from their shows, particularly the later seasons (where about 80% of all their work was done 3/4 and can be emulated almost exactly in AS Pro with a minimum of effort). I know I'll never be a great artist, but thanks to that model I can at least tell my stories (yeah, way OT but there you go).

[basshole]

I kind of took my cues from Aqua Teen/Sealab, that cheap/crappy animation that uses the flat angles and simplistic techniques.

[synthsin75]

Looks correct for the angle, Bass. And I can atest to Mikes work looking very much like Family Guy.

[basshole]

Good! I will post a demo of all my characters animating when I finally get them all done.