I’ve suggested a couple of times that CG animators often don’t use enough blinks and interesting blink patterns to show what their characters are thinking and feeling, and in my last post I put up a live-action clip showing how much a good human actor can do with blinks and half blinks and eye flutters. […]
This will be a shorter post than that on Vanilla Blinks, not because there’s less to say, but because there’s too much. As we saw, there’s a lot of quantifiable information about the generic, spontaneous blinks that we do all the time. Imagine how much could be written about variations on standard blinks!
But instead […]
What could be more simple than making a character blink?
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Animating blinks are a basic part of any living character. Blinks occur in most scenes, yet it’s a place where beginning animators, and occasionally vets, screw up. For today we’ll be […]
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A sample of some of the great reference on eye movements available at the BBC Motion Gallery
The retina of the human eye is divided into a large outer ring of highly light-sensitive but color-insensitive rods, and a comparatively small central region […]
The subject of eye movements is doubly important in animation because the physiology and psychology that applies to our character’s eye movements applies equally to what our actual audience is doing when they watch our animation.
In other words, understanding eye direction and eye movement tells us not only how to animate our characters, but also […]
I’ve been thinking a lot about eyes and eye movements, probably because I’ve done a lot of close-up acting shots on Terra, and some of the characters have HUGE eyes. I’ve found that some of the ‘rules’ and clichés I’ve been taught about how to do eye movements don’t really hold up, or don’t […]