How to animate a plane along a spherical area

Question

I've been using blender for a few months now and am looking to create a character similiar to the one in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=El2lXEz36oQ. So basically, I want a sphereshaped character that can be squashed and stretched and still be able to give me proper control of the eyes. I was thinking a shape key might work, but that it would likely mess with the squash and stretch. And i would believe the topology would be compromised with shapekeys if I want to control the eyes freely. If I could, I'd like to be able to place the eyes on the back of the character.

I also thought about animating the eyes separately with "snap to face" enabled, although i realized there would be a lot of tweaking rotations of the eyes in that case.

My question is therefore: What would be the best way to animate eyes onto a sphere without losing the ability to squash and stretch the sphere and move the eyes freely.

Here is a screenshot of the problem I ran into with the "snap to face" method:

This is my first post, please let me know if I failed to inform any important information on the problem and if I haven't followed proper format of the post. Thank you!

Answer 1

i think this blend file that i did testing this idea could be the answer, just drag with G key and you will see. to do this you have to turn on snap, set it to face and active, and select the icon that saids align rotation with snapping target and its done i think.

Answer 2

I guess there are several solutions, here is one, it has its limits but it really depends on what you want to do exactly:

• Create a sphere + 2 eyes + an armature with 2 bones (with their head at the sphere center and their tail that points to the eyes) + a lattice that contains everything + a big empty.
• Parent each eye to each bone, parent the armature, the sphere and the lattice to the big empty. The empty will allow you to move the whole thing easily.
• Give your eyes and your sphere a Lattice modifier.
• Create a basic shapekey for your lattice, then a second shapekey, keep this second shapekey selected, go in Edit mode and deform your lattice.
• Now the lattice affects both the eyes and the sphere (in Object mode, to activate the shapekey pose you've created, you need to push the Value under the shapekey list), and if you rotate the eye bones, the eyes should slide on the surface of the sphere.