How can i make eyes blink?

[Shirsalino]

I'm relatively new to moho and i like it so far. Animating is pretty relaxing and cool. So here's the question. How can i make eyes blink?
I watched tutorials on youtube but i'm importing PNG files to moho, cropped eyes for example and trying to animate them. Is this even possible?

For example here https://imgur.com/a/jNbR7fs
Am i doing something wrong?

[slowtiger]

Doing this with images:
You need at least 2 images: 1 eye open, 1 eye closed. Import them, put them into a switch layer. The closed eye should be used for 2 famres (at 24 or 25 fps).
Better:
Add 2 different half closed eyes. This sequence would be:
open
half 1
closed
closed
half 2
open

[hayasidist]

you can use a smart (warp) mesh : https://www.mediafire.com/file/04vi0gpi ... k.zip/file if you want more control

[cgrotke]

I sometimes make a smart bone dial to control the up and down motion of eyelids. That way I can set it anywhere from fully open to fully closed.

I've also done the open and closed only, which is great for a cartoony blink. I've aded sound effects to these sorts of blinks before, too, for emphasis.

I agree with slow tiger about keeping the eye closed for just a couple of frames max. I sometimes make the downward moving lid move at a different speed than when it goes back up, to keep it a little more natural.

Eye blinks can be great for punctuating a line of dialogue or helping to focus the viewer's attention on what's to come.

[Greenlaw]

For such a graphic design, I would redraw the eyes as vector art in Moho and use a Smart Bone Dial to blink them. It's certainly possible to do this with a bitmap and a mesh warp, but it will be easier to set up and animate as a vector graphic, and it will look better too. You can keep the rest of the image as bitmap (unless you need higher resolution.) I use this hybrid approach all the time, applying whichever technique is easiest and produces the best result.

If you must use only the bitmap, I would first break out the art into layers, separating the eyebrows from the eyes, and probably the iris' as well. This way, you can use a mesh or bone chain to animate the eyebrows, a mesh to animate the eyelids (you can cut holes in this mesh,) and a simple bone to move each iris. (You'll probably want to paint in the missing part of the iris.) Then set up one or more Smart Bone Dials to wink/blink the eyelids.

[Greenlaw]

@Shirsalino,

BTW, you'll want to remove the bone strength from the Smart Bone Dial...that could mess up the image when you rotate it.

[Greenlaw]

Oh, since you're new, here's another point you might not be aware of:

You cannot use Mesh Warp for an image using Moho's Crop Tool...these two features are incompatible with each other.

You should rely on the mesh itself to crop/matte the image. This works fine and unlike the Crop Tool, the mesh can use an irregular shape as its boundary.

[MrMiracle77]

Switch layers are a good way to make eyes blink if you like using existing images, but they have a limitation that they can only blink in certain increments depending on how many eyes you're willing to draw.

I'm an advocate of a masked group with smartbones, since it allows the pupils to be confined to the eye outline. They can move around independently of the eyelids and allow for more variation in eye pose and expression.

Bone layer (face)
-L Eye (hide all mask)
--Reflection (if desired) (mask this layer)
--Pupil (mask this layer)
--Eye Outline (add to mask)

Smartbones:

Upper eyelid: for blinking or widening the eye in surprise
Lower eyelid: for widening or making cheery expressions.
Pupil Up/Down
Pupil Left/Right

[Greenlaw]

I threw together a demo you can study. It uses the screencap you posted and is not meant to be 'final' quality, but this setup uses only the bitmap image and it should give you some ideas for your own setup...



Here it is in Moho....



I'm using the new Smart Warp Layer to hold and animate parts of the drawing. This layer also has two holes cut out to remove the eyes region. The lines around the eyelids are used to animate the eyelids and the other guide lines hold the eyebrows and eye crease in place.

Next I duplicated the drawing and manually created a new mesh to cover each eye. The mesh started out as two grids. The outer regions of the grid hold the edges of the eye in place while the center part of the grid is used to move the middle part (the iris.) The points that make the center square are then bound to separate eye bones, with a parent bone in the center. This allows me to animate each eye independently or I can move them together using one bone.

(Note: I avoid using a Smart Bone Dial (SBD) to move irises. Using an SBD limits their movement possibilities and this approach isn't necessarily easier to animate with. IMO, it's easier to simply parent the irises to bones and move the bones where you want them.)

Behind everything is yet another copy of the drawing. This is used to fill in any 'holes' in the animation. (I'm not sure it's necessary here; I did this just to be safe.)

Finally, I set up three SBDs...two Wink controls to close each eye independently, and a Blink control to animate both Wink controls together. (You can simplify this by just making only the Blink SBD.)

The shortcomings in this demo:

Because I didn't separate the layers in a paint program, I can't really move the irises without some artifacts appearing. This can be easily corrected by properly breaking out the elements before bringing the artwork into Moho. The same is true for the eyebrows; when the eyelids close, they pull part of the eyebrows down with them. I was able to partially hide this by animating the eyebrows along with the eyelids.

Here's the demo file...

eyeblink.zip

Hope this helps.

[Greenlaw]

Oh, and even though I'm using the new Smart Warp layer, this can be done using regular meshes in earlier versions of Moho like 12.5.

It's just easier to set up the eyelids in 13.5.2 using this new feature. To create the holes for the eyes in the Smart Warp layer, I drew two circles in the layer and edited the shapes to fit the 'eye hole' edges in the drawing.

For the mesh warp that's used to move the irises left and right, I created a quad mesh manually because I wanted use a specific 'grid' layout. (Smart Warp generates an arbitrary triangulated mesh, which I didn't want here.)

After some practice and experience, you'll know better when to use which method.