Need some help for an experiment (Eye animation)

Question

I'm a new member, and I thought this place was great for the question i'm going to ask. Here's the thing: I'm doing a little experiment on Blender, where I create and animate an eye, but not like people usually do, look here:

To explain it in my own words, I'm trying to keep the eyeball on the outside of the head, cartoon style, and that's all for modelling. Regarding the animation, i'm trying to:

1)make the pupil ''slide'' on the surface of the eyeball while the latter stays still (see figure number 1 on the image below for more details);

2)make the eyeball round (as you can see in the images above, its default shape is not round) and the pupil smaller when the character is surprised (see figure number 2);

3)make the pupil morph into other shapes (for example when the character closes its eyes; see figure number 3);

I'm sorry if I made this question too long, and if you need any clarification, just ask me. Hopefully one of you can help me here.

---

Okay, here I am again. I tried to do like you've described, but it didn't work. Maybe I'll show a couple more details so maybe you can understand what's wrong:

To describe the second picture, I put the pupil directly into the eye and not with a separate texture, could that be the mistake I've made? If so, what other method can I use?

Answer 1

From the texture provided in your question, you can use "uv warp" modifier to do this:

How to do it:

• UV unwrap the eye part that will be textured.
• Place this UV part over the texture part you want: move and scale (big pupil, for instance)
• Add the "UV warp" modifier.
• The modifier uses two objects, say empties. One is the base, the other one "empty.001" is the one to shift from the base.

Move the empty so that its position and scale makes the UV cover the wanted part of the texture.

Keyframe it when the position is ok.

Do it for all steps of your animation.

Then, go to the graph editor to edit the empty movement to constant steps.

The corresponding shader node tree:

Note: if the background is not pink but white as the eye is, you can add some more variations, as done here: How can I move a UV Island to simulate the Movement of an Eye