Blender 2.5 Character Animation Cookbook

In the blink of an eye

Although a very simple body mechanism to animate, the blinking of our eyes is a very important method of communicating. We can look at the action of our blinking eyes in the following ways:

• Organically, it's a way to keep our eyes moist. This is the technical aspect we needn't care about. Our audience really doesn't care if our characters' eyes are wet or not.
• As an "editing" device: as we look around, our blinking eyes "cut" between scenes. When you turn your head quickly from left to right for example, your eyes normally blink in the middle of this action. This blinking helps your eyes accommodate the change of focus when looking at different things. If we think of it as a movie inside our head, it would be something like: ...