Stopping eye gitters (when snap eye gaze is off)

Forum|Forum|8 years ago
January 25, 2018
5 replies
1050 views

If I sit perfectly still looking at the eyes of my character on the screen, they move. I have eye gaze off as I wanted more eye positions than the 9 the snap function allows. Sometimes it looks like the movement is due to me breathing (slight body movement, results in eye movement). I have tried fiddling with lots of settings, but I cannot get it so I look directly at the screen without moving and the eyes stay still.

What I would like for example is a threshold - ignore any eye movement less than X percentage. Is this possible?

This topic is closed to new replies. Start a new post to keep the conversation going.

CoSA_DaveS

Participating Frequently

No, but if you increase Smoothing it might calm down the movement enough?

If we had an option for more than 9 positions, would that be the ideal situation? How many positions would you want?

alank99101739Author

Legend

I tried smoothing, but I found it still moved around, just...smoother. I still could not make the puppet stare straight ahead. I guess more than 9 positions could help - its still rounding off the position to remove jitters. I guess you would always want to look straight ahead, so it would be 5x5 instead of 3x3 grid? Obviously you could not do all positions with keyboard short cuts any more. However I am not sure it would be worth the effort. Also 5x5 would not give smooth eye pans - it would be jerky ones. I was trying for a smooth eye pan then a hold at the end in whatever direction it was looking at (then more pans etc).

One thing I discovered after posting this is the “keyboard strength” setting for eye movements. That is, I can change how far the puppet looks to the left. That helped a bit. I can then pan eye positions by blending the keyboard strength maybe... A bit painful to use however.

Why Am I asking for this? I just had an example where a puppet’s eyes were trying to track a moving object. It actually looked quite good when the eyes were moving. You could not notice any jitter. Its just when the eyes stopped moving, then jitter became obvious. It is clear the eyes are not holding still.

Or is there a way to freeze the current eye positions? E.g. record a take, then somehow lay over the top a take that says to “hold position” to lock the eyes. I would not mind having a keyboard trigger for example to freeze current eye position (stop getting inputs from camera) - I look around with my eyes (with smoothing on to help) then press a trigger when my eyes stop moving to tell it “lock the eyes here”. Just kicking around ideas. But a keyboard to lock the eyes plus smoothing might work quite well.

To me, however its possible, success is being able to do a smooth eye pan then stop moving the eyes and have them look in that direction without any movement (smoothness does not stop movement - just makes the transition smoother) - which is annoying to look at). Right now the camera, no matter how still I sit looking at one spot on the screen, is picking up eye movements (or making them up when they don’t really exist).

Thanks for thinking about this!

CoSA_DaveS

Participating Frequently

I think you'll be able to do what you want by doing this:

1. disarm Eye Gaze's Camera Input

2. arm Mouse & Touch Input

3. turn off Snap Eye Gaze if it's on

Now you can click and drag in the scene panel to control eye gaze with the mouse and record the full take. This way it's much easier to stop in place. You can still combine with the tracking / keyboard control, and balance them with the Strength parameters (which can also be animated).

Instead of recording (or in addition), you can also use Timeline > Record 1-frame Take to create a very short take that you can then position in time, add blends, duplicate etc. Like recording, it creates takes for all armed parameters. For inputs like Mouse & Touch Input, the mouse has to be down when you do it.

In the next release (no ship date yet), there will be a new Timeline > New Hold Take command that will let you create one of these short takes more easily by reading the value already in the timeline, or selected triggers in the trigger panel.

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.