[Ave]

Hi everyone

Im busy working on the fishy tut at the moment, and on part 6 or 7 we create the fishes eyes, and then create a morph of the iris in a wider position.

we then insert the new eyes into the fish model and rotate them.......

later on phillip comes back to the eyes and show a problem that occured when we rotated the base layer..... the morph didnt rotate along with it, so as soon as I select the wide-Iris morph, its crooked

he then states that rotating the base layer wasnt the best way to do it, and fixes the iris, but he never actually tells us what the correct way to move an object and a morph at the same time is??

can anyone help me out here- is there a way to link the base and morph object together so that when you rotate the eye, all the iris morphs move with it

[NoStr0m0]

well, moving a morph isn't really a problem. it's when you want to rotate it that things get ugly.

from what I found out, you can't. Period. It's better to plan ahead a bit.

If you're working on eyes and want to create an open-close iris, create a separate object and separate them into layers, something like:
- eyeball (the actual eye, with that big, beautiful iris and the lens (if you intend to create a more anatomically correct eye, you would make a kinda squashed ball to act as the lens. Not sure if it looks better or worse without it))
- reflection+refraction layer (that would be the transparent layer to make it look real plus copy of the transparent geometry, flipped and assigned an Air texture (trans=100, dif=0, refl=0, refr=1 to make the eye react in a more real way to light)

and now. copy everything in layer one to layer 4.
modify the iris (and lens) to open/close, depending on the position it's in in layer one. After you're satisfied with the results save the object as eye_premorph or something.

Now, when you've finished the body and are sure where the eyes will be, open the eyes object and copy it into the body object by layers meaning copy layer one to layer something, layer two to layer something+1 and so forth.
Ok, now select all the eye layers and rotate them and move them to their final resting place.

After you've finished select the eyeball layer and in the background put the "morphed" eyeball (the layer you changed to be the morph position of the iris) and from the maps tab click Background to Morph, add a name and voila, you have your iris morph. All you have to do now is move all the useful eye-layers to one single layer(that would be eyeball plus transparent stuff) calculate the center of the eye and place a pivot point there.
Mirror the eye, select the new one, cut and paste in the following layer, set it's pivot point as the previous one but the x value becomes -x. Name the layers eye_left, eye_right, parent to body... and that's about it.