Implementation - Attaching Eyes

I realised whilst doing the lip syncing that the eyes needed to move up and down with the top lip (shown in the image above) as the spade spoke. The problem I had achieving this was that when I linked the eyes to lips, they would stay in the same position, even though the lips would move.

The only way I could think of to get around this problem was to attach the eyes so that they were part of the same object as the handle. This had a major drawback in that I couldn’t texture the eyes after they had been attached with a UV map. This meant I could not make the eyes move or blink at all.

What I needed was a way of linking an object (the eyes) to a polygon on top of the lips, so that if the polygon moved the eyes would follow. After explaining my problem to one if my past 3D tutors, he got back to me the next day with the solution. Buried away under animation constraints in 3D Studio Max was a tool to do exactly what I needed.

This allowed me to select an exact polygon and attach the eyes to it. I then rotated and moved them to make them central by moving pivot point. I repeated the process with every tool that had a mouth.