According the book, this is how not to do it. Mr. White suggests that because everything in nature moves in arcs, the vertical position of the head moves down, then back up (hold your chin and turn your head, and it will be more clear). The books says a straight turn looks too mechanical, and I agree, judging from the poor fellow above. Mr. White also suggests that the features will appear to slide across the face, but I think that's a 2D thing (I wonder if I would have gotten that effect if I had used the Toon shader?). Other suggestions for a more natural feeling character were to add a quick blink mid-turn, and to have the eyes lead the motion (and again, Mr. White says the pupil should move in arcs, not a straight turn).

Here's my same little guy. I tried to incorporate some of the ideas you suggested in the blink project. There shouldn't be any problem nesting various colors into the iris shader. Making different shapes, though, would be tough, since the slope shader attribute is looking for parts of the sphere (eyeball) that are at an angle greater or less than the established angle. Since the eyeball is perfectly spherical, if you change the slope, the size of the blue part changes.... I don't think you would have gotten the feature-slide thing if you used the toon shader; it's a 2D animation thing, but anticipating movement is something you can do in 3D....

Oooh, a double-take. I hadn't thought of that. Cool! I think it makes sense that the sliding thing is a 2D phenomenon, with 3D I think there are more visual cues for the brain to interpret. Speaking of visual cues, I'm starting to get amazed at how much expression and character one can get from really small animation effort. Just a few keyframes, and your dude is already registering surprise and suspicion (or that's how it strikes me). Whee! This animation stuff is pretty fun.

OK, this guy still needs some work, but I thought I'd go ahead and post it.

twillis, I really like your little "worm guy" I could really see it in some type of sci-fi flick! Maybe directed by Lucas or something along those lines! I think I'm going to have to start playing with Carrara again and take advantage of some of these challenges! Good work! Jared

Like RJJ, seeing your anims really makes me wanna try to do some myself . Terri, i can't figure out how you did your worm ... Is it a spline object, a deformer, a bunch of spheres ...? Also, how did you attach the eye ? litst

Well, I tried to cram everything in this picture. The neck was a vertex object (shown left) that was made out of a cylinder. A bend was applied to it (settings to the right). The keyframe on the neck line was me changing the bend. Actually, what I did was drop the lower limit to affect the whole object. The eye parts were children to a part called "rSocket", which was really just a stationary eyelid (borrowing from Geek's pacman technique), which in turn was the child of the neck. I did have to reposition the eye socket manually (and you can see the keyframes for this) for the change in bends, it didn't stay attached to the end (and if you look close, I didn't do it quite right). But the rotation and all that stuff followed without manual adjustment. I think I'm going to save this worm guy; I think he'll make an excellent eye stalk for an alien character. It also might be fun to see if I can get him to inch along the ground, as well.

Thanks Terri ! Great techniques, and it works well !