Research on Character
Blinks in
Animation
Sandeep Maithani
School of Multimedia
Lovely Professional University, Punjab
Abstract: Facial animation is the heart and
soul of the film and eyes play a very
important role in expressing what emotion a
character is going through.Blinks can to a
greater extent convey to the audiences what
character is feeling emotionally or what
his/her state of mind is. Eye animation mainly
consists of Blinks,eye darts and eyebrows
movement but this paper mainly deals with
blinks in eye animation.
Introduction: In my workflow I do some
really weird and specific stuff to force the
Pupil to do what I wanted in my blinks.
Now with that in mind let's talk about the
blocking of this type of an exercise to block
this out I use three controls and the result of
that is here with only three controls
that is the upper lid the lower lid and
the master and an eye controller that
moves the pupils around
I took it this far now what I want to
share here is that the upper lid does
percent of the work it goes most of
the way down the bottom lip comes up
just a little bit so it's not like right
halfway in the shutter that the top of
the bottom lid both go right in the
middle that's not really how our eyes
work and the third control is just kind
of where the eyes look when you close
your eyes and move your eyeballs around
you get this fluttery thing that happens ,
that's because your pupil and your
eyelids touch and they move around kind
of together so when you close your eyes
the lids don't just go without the
pupil's reacting. It pushes the pupil
Down.Now the second thing we need to do
once we block that in is to add one more
control and that's the eye brow up and down
so if you do that and copy/paste it to the other
side which is a big burr flow thing here
just do one eye and then copy/paste
everything this is pretty much what you
end up with and with only four controls
it's easy to move around the timing and
try different things but when you are
doing the eyebrow it's not just an
up-and-down you have to keep in mind are
the sides coming down first is this
leading like there there should be some
kind of a wave happening or at least you
know some kind of lead and follow to
show that's not just one block of
geometry moving up and down there's
there's some muscles some overlap but it
gives you an opportunity to make it look
a little bit better you can take it from
this with only four controls to then add
a few more controls use the different
brow controls and get this so you can
see the difference is subtle but it
doesn't makes it feel a little bit less
mechanical and more organic which is
what we're after here but this is what I
would call the blocking of the blink the
whole thing all the blocking and a big
thing that's gonna help us with things
feeling organic is timing now if I were
to kind of draw out a chart of how I do
my I blink sand this is again this is
based on lots of very talented animators
teaching me stuff so most of this is not
