Rigging a Pupil for Dilation

by Jonathan Williamson
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Animation, Rigging, Tutorials

In this Blender 2.5 video tutorial we show you how to use driven shape-keys to dilate the pupil of an eye. The tutorial also demonstrates how to use custom bone shapes and limiting the transformation of a bone via constraints.

Note: this tutorial uses the official Blender 2.5 Alpha 2 release.

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36 Responses to “Rigging a Pupil for Dilation”
  1. Posts: 9
    John A.M. says:

    THANK YOU! :-D i’ve been trying how to make a custom bone forever :-)

  2. Posts: 38
    Dominik Kirylo says:

    Do i have to do this twice when the eyes are separated objects or is there any solution to affect it on the other eye?

  3. Posts: 17
    Roger Joseph says:

    Hi It’s me again. I’m having a problem getting this to work in while scaling the bone in pose mode. However when I scale it in object mode it works fine. Did I do something wrong?

    • Posts: 3070
      Jonathan Williamson says:

      Hey Xero,

      It sounds like perhaps you forgot to assign the constraint or the driver to the armature AND the bone; instead you probably only assigned it to the armature.

    • Posts: 3070
      Jonathan Williamson says:

      Rigid body physics are currently being ported over as a GSOC project to be integrated directly into 2.5. Currently they must be done by using the Game Engine. To do that you need to change your rendering engine engine to the “Blender Game” from the top header, and enable “Record Animation” from the Game menu.

      -Jonathan

  6. Posts: 17
    Paulie Torres says:

    Jonathan Will you be doing an entire face rig in the future, I think that would be awesome:)

  7. Posts: 7
    Ronald Mourant says:

    The file, rigging_pupil_dilate.blend, that came with the tutorial appears to have some things already done. For example, the shape (controller) is on top of the left eye, and the shape keys, Basis and pupil_dilate are in the properties window.

    Is it possible to get a rigging_pupil_dilate.blend file that is ready to begin this tutorial?

    Thanks.

  8. Posts: 2
    Saulo Augusto Duarte says:

    Does anyone knows if it’s possible to rig and animate 2D eyes?

  9. Posts: 3
    Clayton Boone says:

    Man, Thank you! And everyone at Blender for that matter. Been following David Ward’s Creating an Advanced Face Rig tutorial, and in the last part he starts of showing some upgrades that he made. Specifically a mouth shape bone which he scales to open Edward’s mouth. At last I can finally regain some sense of sanity.
    However my sort drive to insanity was in part due to Blender being a bit-buggy. I found that in order for things to work right I had to set everything up just as Jonathan did for the driver & modifier, and without being tempted to try to move the bone during the set up. Than press the update button. And…it WORKED!
    Thanks Again

  10. Posts: 3
    shogakusha says:

    Thanks for another great tutorial. I saw something on a similar line in another tutorial (back on 2.4x) that used something called Shape Widget Wizard (widgetwizard.py) that seemed to do a lot of this for you within Scripting. Now in 2.6x it seems the Scripting window is gone and there are indications that widgetwizard.py is now bundled with Blender, I cannot find it. Any ideas?

    Basically I am going through your telescope tutorial and thought that shape keys would be a great way to handle collapsing the parts of the telescope.

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