After gathering some stakeholder feedback this week, I decided to give eyelash addition a go to test out whether it would improve the believability of my rig’s eyelid movements.
My first attempt was done on the third persona (kpop idol) as it is supposed to possess the flashiest eye makeup. Due to lack of time I didn’t want to go through the trouble of creating eyelash blendshapes and having to reset my rig, which could potentially break my animations – instead I resorted to a very unorthodox method involving the Point on Poly geometry constraint.
Combining a few lashes at a time (instead of the whole thing as one mesh) and constraining these on appropriate faces of the eyelid to follow only its Y attribute, did the trick for me. The only issue I’m facing with this method concerns the head control (when the head is moved, the eyelashes stop following along). This could probably be fixed via a parent constraint to the head joint.
When it came to the rest of the personas, the eyelashes were shorter and less perky – just enough for them to show on the render.
I added HDRI Lighting on the dome light as well as a blue key light for the holo device, where the rig is supposed to be projected from in the scene. The video attached above is the result of my animation render tests. I will be working on improving the seamlessness of the compositing onto my live action shots in the next few weeks.
Myreen Castro R&D Blog 