Details for the Eye Design

As the saying goes, "The eyes are the window of the soul". Therefore it is important to have the ability to customize them in detail for your character. Each standard character in CrazyTalk Animator has roll-able eyeballs, which makes the character more realistic. In this section, you will learn how to produce a single roll-able eye (vector-based eye element) with Adobe Flash.

Please note that after this section, you will only learn how to produce one eye element. If you want to have an eye with complete eye expressions, then you need to generate 13 (or above) eye elements according to the eye-mapping-list. Please refer to The Concept and Workflow of Animation-Ready Facial Feature Set Design section for more information.

Producing Roll-able Eyeball

  1. Create three symbols for the eye.

    Sketch an eyeball with pupil and iris, this must be converted into a Movie Clip symbol.

    Sketch an eyelid image, this must be converted it into a Movie Clip symbol.

    Sketch a mask area, must also be converted it into a Movie Clip symbol. The eyeball can only be shown inside of this area.

  2. In the working area, drag and drop the eyelid symbol to the center of the document.
  3. In the Properties panel, type Image to the Instance Name text field.
  4. Create a new layer, drag and drop the eyeball symbol to the center of the document in this new layer.
  5. In the Properties panel, type Pupil to the Instance Name text field.
  6. Create a new layer, then drag and drop the mask symbol to the center of the document in this new layer.
    Please note that the mask area is not allowed to be generated from any image with alpha data, such as PNG or TGA.

  7. In the Properties panel, type Mask to the Instance Name text field.
  8. Right click on the new layer and select Mask, it will now mask out the pupil instance.
  9. Save this file and export a movie in SWF format.

Testing the Result

  1. Select a vector-based character and switch to the Character Composer mode.
  2. Pick one of the eyes and open the Sprite Editor.
  3. Load the prepared SWF eye element data. Close the Sprite Editor.
  4. Leave the Composer Mode and update the character.
  5. Select the character and open the Sprite Editor.
  6. Change the eye to the new SWF data.
  7. Open the Facial Puppeteering Panel and pick the eye. Press space bar to begin previewing the result.