Capture the best eye movement

- Your character's eyes tell the audience a lot. But, only if the eyes are doing what you want them to. (upbeat tunes) So, you've recorded a scene, but you kept looking at your notes, your script, your character's eyes just don't look the direction that you want them to. Well, luckily it's easy to edit, and you have a few options for recording new eye direction movement. So, let's take a quick look at this little sample scene I recorded and take a look and a listen. Hello, I'm here to tell you... Oh, hey dog face, what's up? Well, I actually hate the way this looks.

The eyes are kind of looking all over the place, rather than at the camera. And, then when he goes hey dog face, which is what I call my best friend, I want him looking over toward camera right. So, what you can do in character animator, is for any element that you're recording, record new pieces and smooth and edit them in. However, in this case, I don't like the eyes at all, so I'm just going to get rid of it completely. So, let's come down here to our eye gaze. I'm going to select that, the camera input. I'm going to hit delete. Let's just get rid of it.

There's nothing there for the eyes. I'm going to record a new sequence. So, I'm going to turn off everything except for the eye gaze. Turn off the microphone. Let's open up eye gaze. So, right now, we're set for camera input. I can record it again, with the camera input, but in this case, let's go with the mouse and touch input. So, with mouse and touch input, as I click the mouse and drag it, as long as I'm holding the button down, the eyes are going to follow my mouse around.

Let's re-record, and I'll just do the eyes. As you could see over here. Hello, I'm here to tell you... Oh, hey dog face, what's up? Alright, I think that's actually pretty good. That and it looks... Let's playback one more time. Take a look. Hello, I'm here to tell you... Oh, hey dog face, what's up? See, that's perfect, that's exactly what I was going for.

Now, I have another option which I could do. I could turn off mouse and touch input, and I can go to keyboard input. So, keyboard allows me to use my arrow keys. And, if I hit the right key, it looks to the right. Left key looks to the left. Up key and down key, and it'll center itself back. Now, I don't have as many options because I can't do the angles, but it's a good way if you just need to have someone look somewhere really quickly, you can just set it up. You can use the keyboard input, record a second, or however much you need, an you're done.

One other other thing that you can do is snap eye gaze. So, I'm going to go back to camera input. So as I look around, my eyes are going to snap to different positions, rather than float around on the face. And, I have set right now, the minimum snap duration of one second. See, I can actually carry that up. So, as I look somewhere else, the eyes are going to really snap and stay in one position for that minimum duration. Well, I don't like the way that looks.

So, I can reset it, or anytime you hit the exit, it just goes back to the default settings, which default for snap duration is one second. So, if you don't want the eyes floating around. You want them to kind of snap into a position, and then back to a center, or to another position, snap eye gaze is the option for you. Now, you may find that you want to use various different eye movement options, at different times, depending on what you need. Luckily the choice is yours. (upbeat tunes)