Week 7 Part 3 - Eye Cleanup

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(Note: This part was so uncomfortable as someone on the spectrum 😭😭 Eyes are not my friend!!)

For the eyes I began with the eyeballs as I knew this would require the most manual working. The tracking overall wasn't so bad but there was lots of jerking and the movements definitely didn't match in parts. I duplicated the Y axis motion from the Right onto the Left since they're generally supposed to line up with one another. I did the same for the X axis but added a teeny bit of offset so that it would account for the difference in movement. Luckily she spends a good part with her eyes staring AT something so both of the eyes had a target and would therefore have similar positions. The tiniest changes to the slopes in the graph truly made all the difference.

I honestly found the eyes didn't need a crazy amount of work - I think the retargeting came out really accurate all things considered. The main parts I worked on other than the directional movement of the eyes was timing the squints to match the blinks; the squints needed to start a little ahead of the actual blink so that there was some anticipation in the movement and it would look more like the eyelids were being pulled tighter in.

I also made sure to adjust the eyelids to be as wide as the reference. This made the position of the eyeball look more accurate relative to the eyelids and how much of the iris was covered at any point. Since the model's irises are not the same size as they are in the video I did the best I could to match but relativity to the eyelids is not the best way to work out the position of the eyeballs in this case.

A big help for this section was the fact that she does ultimately spend much of the clip staring dead on with little movement in her eyes. The apples of her cheeks don't move much and don't impact the shape of the eyes so I was able to breeze through that component. She has a few times where her eyelids flutter but they're so quick and tracked in well enough that the most manual fixing ended up being in the eyeballs instead - and since the eyeball position itself affects so much of the eyelids it became more of a case of touching up around the main eyeball movement.


FINAL EYE CLEANUP


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