I've been working on a new approach to fine control of eyebrows and eyelashes.
The first step
is to use Manuel Bastioni's eyebrow and eyelash design. He advocates individual meshes for clumps of hairs.
If you have ever watched young women do their eye makeup (I had three teen-age sisters), you'll know that this is what they do.
The second step
After that, I created a variation of the eyebrow rig. The sequence is backward from the default rig, with a target IK bone added.
I'll use the left eyebrow/eyelash system for my example:
eyeBrowTargetIK_L --> innerEyeBrow_L --> middleEyeBrow_L --> outerEyeBrow_L
Moving the IK bone creates very natural-looking movements in the eyebrow (both flesh and hairs).
The third step :
is to create upperEyeLash and lowerEyeLash Bezier curves as modifiers to the eye lashes.
(This supposes that one has created upperEyeLash and lowerEyeLash vertex groups in your meshes.)
Don't forget to CurveStretch your meshes here.
Here it gets a little hairy (pardon the pun): the Beziers curves need to be subdivided (once) and three Hook modifers need to be added to each curve.
What you get from this are three Empties (I suggested resizing the arrows to .125) ; they will allow you control a third of the meshes in XYZ axes.
From here, you can choose how you want your eyelid to function. I created eyeSocket vertex groups, and then divided them into six, one for each of these rig bones:
innerEyeLid_L; middleEyeLid_L; outerEyeLid_L; innerEyeLid_R; middleEyeLid_R; outerEyeLid_R.
You'll probably have to do this manually, because Automatic Weighting doesn't do that great a job.
Because of that, it is important the weight-paint the lid vertex groups so that they interact in a natural way. My approach so far is to start with a central weight of .50, and use .25 on the common edges of the vertex groups, marked in gold.
Here is a quick sketch of what I have described. I'll do several screen captures of models later on.
And here is what the controls (rig, curves and hoooks) looks like full on:
and here is what a Left Blink looks like in OpenGL:
and a simple UV texture map render:
Is is perfect yet? No. Both lashes are too close to the bridge of the nose. But it is perfectly controllable; the curves can be adjusted.
And not just in Blender; everything I've done here can be recreated in Maya, Cinema 4d or Modo. But I'll let others do that.
Ten years ago I was knocked over by the Geisha Project, and I've spent a bit of time figuring out what the original artist did.
http://www.cgchannel.com/wp-content/upl ... man100.jpg
I'll make this model uploadable (in a newer, stable version of Blender) in a couple of days.