Rigging Eyes

As long as you only do classic weighting, rigging the eyes is easy:

  • Take care that the eyes are separate mesh parts. You can either separate them as submeshes in your head object, or just make separate objects for each eye, it does not matter
  • Take care that the eyes are rigged to your Avastar. If the eye meshes are submeshes of the head, then they are already rigged together with the head. if they are separate objects, then take care to bind them to your mesh as usual
  • Take care that the entire eye mesh of the left eye is only weighted to the mEyeLeft bone
  • Take care that the right eye is only weighted to the mEyeRight Bone

Now export as usual. Things should work fine for you.

Details for the System character

You can understand the following chapter best when you have knowledge about the principles of skeletal animation. We have created a document that hopefully helps to understand the basics:

Skinning Fundamentals

Now lets take a more detailed look at what is going on with the Eyes in the Secondlife Avatar. So please do this in Blender (Avastar):

  • Create a new Avastar using Add -> Avastar ..
  • Select the left Eye
  • In Avastar -> Settings select the preset named “Skin&Weight”

Now the Armature is in pose mode and the mesh is in weight paint mode.

When you select the left eye bone mEyeLeft, then you see the left eye turns red which indicates that the entire eye mesh is weighted to the mEyeLeft bone.

In the Object data properties of the Eye you see there is only one single vertext group (weight map) available, so the left eye has been fully weighted to the left eye bone.

But having each vertex of an eye weighted to exactly one bone and having all vertices of the mesh weighted to the same bone (mEyeLeft) is exactly the same as if the left eye is clamped to the left eye bone.

And just like the left eye has only one weightgroup named mEyeLeft the right eye also has just one weight group named mEyeRigh. And this is all you need to know.. almost

Details for custom mesh characters

mFaceEyeAltLeft and mFaceEyeAltRight is a second set of eye bones.