Animation Study - Blinking Eye

BLINKING EYE
Animator Q

I am a character animator and also program director of 3dsense media school always looking for detail and delicate animation.

I will start looking eye-blinking animation deeper.
Here is the study for it.

First of all, we need to look over how real persons blink eyes. Here is the real footage.(#1)

#1

and now we will go over the way to analyse blinking.

First, as you can see an images below ( #2, and you can check animation #3 using #2), which I exported sequence images for that, we can check the spacing by drawing red line on upper eye lid. 

For the normal eye blinking, upper eye lid moves down fully in 3fr(from 1 to 4) having easy out and then eye closed at least 2fr having cushion( if you see fr num 4 and 5, the red line moves a bit down) and moves up fully in 4fr at least ( from 6 to 10) having easy in. 

Interesting thing is that the time to close eyes is faster than the time to open those. 

Overall, it happened within around 1 sec, if I put easy in/out.

#2

#3

Second thing is that, if you see eye lids carefully, you can see both eye lids moves inside to the center.
The below #4 is example.

#4

The black line is the shape of opened eye and the green line one is the one of closed.

As I analysed it, I could check the actual line moves inside and down- you can check line B. So we can guess that Muscles around eyes shrink inside like line C 

Additionally when eyes are closed fully, the upper lids push the skin of under lids and that makes A pulls out a bit.
For the eyebrows, when eyes are blinked, we could find out difference of the amount of movement of C and C'. In short, C is moving more amount than C'.

Final one is that skin has "viscosity'.

 " Viscosity is the quality that some liquids have of being thick and sticky."

So when we open eyes, each part of eye lids leave each other at different timing. If you think about one eye, tip part of the eye will depart each other later than center.

Also, Iris would get bigger when we close eyes and smaller vice versa because of dark/light adaptation.

So...here is the animation that I put my knowledge all together.

blink test from Q on Vimeo.

Thank you for watching!

by

Q