From the course: Maya: Facial Rigging

Controlling eye direction - Maya Tutorial

From the course: Maya: Facial Rigging

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Controlling eye direction

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- [Instructor] Now let's move on to rigging the eyes and the eyelids. We're going to start with eye direction. Now how you rig eye direction may depend upon how you want to animate the character, but typically the standard is that the eyes are aimed at a target. So let's create a target and then aim the eyes at that target. So we're going to go into, say, a front view here and I'm just going to draw a NURBS circle. Not too big, just about the size of the eye, maybe a little bit smaller. And we're going to call that control eye direction left. And then I'm going to hit Ctrl D to duplicate, create another one of those and that'll be control eye direction right. So we're going to want these joints that control the eye. So that would be this joint here that controls the eye. I want that to be pointed at this target. First we need to align the control to the joints, so that it's pointing directly at it. And we can do that by moving the control. Now I'm going to hold down the letter V. And that will snap to vertex. And I want to snap to that joint right there at the front of the eye, okay? And then I'm going to move that forward a bit about a head to a head and a half's worth of distance. You want to give it enough distance, so that it's not right up against the eye. And let's do the same for the other side. So I'm going to take my right control and again, move it and snap it to that joint. And then just move it straight out along z and then I'm going to align them by eye here in the side view. So now these are pretty much aligned. And all we have to do now is make the eyes point at them. Now before we do anything, though, I do want to zero these out. We do want to have our controls zeroed out. So let's go ahead and do a modify freeze transformations and that will zero it out. Now for these I'm not as concerned about the orientation of these because they're not controlling a joint, it's really just a look at constraint. So let's go ahead and select eye direction left. I'm going to turn on X-ray joints here, I'm going to zoom in and shift select this joint. Eye one left. And then do constrain aim. And we want to make sure that maintain offset is clicked on. And then click add. So if I turn off X-ray, you should be able to look at that object. So now when you control eye direction, it will always look at this object. So let's do the other one. So I'm going to go ahead and select this. See if I can get this. Got the second one, didn't have to use x-ray. Constrain aim. There we go. So now this works. And so if I select both of them, I can move the eyes wherever I want or move them individually. So all we've done is we've taken the joint controls the eye, we've aimed it at a target and now we can control eye direction.

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