Creating the “symptom of life” is the goal of digital artists who create
anthropomorphized virtual characters. To succeed in this goal, facial expression becomes an important tool to the animator. The eyes are an essential part of facial expression and how we perceive emotion due to our innate and social focus on the eyes. Its subtleties offer a wealth of information in regard to the intended emotional state of the character.
Animators are responsible for creating the performance of the character. As a character rigger, one of my responsibilities is to supply animators with the tools they need to accomplish their tasks. The animator’s goal in the use of the deformations, which are designed to control expression in the virtual face, is to increase the “perceptible reality” of the character and to elicit empathy from the viewer.
The objective of this thesis is to create a set of ideals for modeling and deforming anthropomorphized eyes and eyelids that allow animators to create recognizable expression. Additionally, I design a rigging system created within these rules that is capable of meeting animator’s deformation needs for a character’s eyes and eyelids.
Reviewing pre-existing approaches of animating and rigging for expression in
animated characters is my first step. From simplified representations of the face I identify the areas whose changes are necessary to convey expression. These areas, which I call the lines of the face, are used to inform facial control placement, hierarchy and influence. Assessing the study of perception and expression helps me in ascertaining the usefulness of the fundamentally innate facial expressions, which I use to develop a basis for a character’s range of expressive facial motion. I also examine and summarize anatomy and kinesiology relative to the eye in order to understand the framework from which expression is driven.
Next, I present and evaluate a number of rigging designs in which I attempt to simultaneously enable an animator to account for attention, reaction and expression in a character. From this process emerges a set of ideals, which help define the needs of an anthropomorphized digital character’s eye region necessary to mimic human facial communication.
The final rig solution creates behavioral correlations between the eyes and eyelid, as well as incorporating deformation from nearby areas of the face. This design creates a simple control structure capable of making effective and complex deformations. Most importantly, in the hands of an animator the system ties together the eye area’s ability to behave consistently, endow concentration, and communicate emotion.
In conclusion, while more complex in rigging implementation than some eye and lid systems, execution time is rewarded with a robust system with a simple control structure capable of accommodating animation needs.
Based on the foundation that I have established for eye and eyelid rigging for expressive anthropomorphized character animation, I conclude with suggestions for further refinement of eyelid rigging based on qualitative data obtained through production testing and future developments applied to other areas of the face based on similar methodologies.