Procedural Eye-Dart Animation (Patreon)

(If you don't animate in blender, you can skip this one, there's not much here for you, besides a little gif of Chase. But hey, look, it's Chase! Isn't he a pretty boy? Lookit' him, bein' all pretty. Okay bye non-animators see you next time.)

Hey there! I, uh, got a little distracted. I'm working on the monthly painting, honest! It's drawn and inked and ready for painting, but after some chatting with Sen about automating those little eye-darts because they're annoying to animate manually, I got the idea in my head that I could probably make a procedural version of it using Geometry Nodes now that simulation nodes are a thing, and yup! Looks like I can. I think it's pretty freakin' cool, so I'm sharing it!

Notice how his eyes do those little darts in between the big movements of the eye controller, without the eye controller itself moving? That's it. That's all this does. But it does it ~automagically~ and that's very nice to have as an animator. You can control the minimum and maximum time between darts, and the maximum distance darts can travel. Darts always "seek out" the starting rotation, always homing back in on the centre so it shouldn't be possible for the eye to drift too far off target, other than by your maximum dart distance, of course.

I made it as easy to use as I know how, but it will require a little hands-on operation to make fully functional so some comfort using blender is a requirement here. I included a how-to text in the blend file that should come up when it's opened, should tell you all you need to know I think. This hasn't been extensively tested, but I have slapped it on two of my characters so far and both times it worked just fine so it should work for you too if you set it up right, and your eyes are made in a compatible way.

Alright that's it. If you end up using this in anything and like how it turns out, lemme know I'd love to see!