Overview
Recently I saw a person in the SFM forums having some trouble with a blinking animation since the blink slider doesn’t work. It hadn’t even occurred to me that some people may not know how to create a proper blink animation, since I had found a rather simple workaround to the problem. However, since this is a common issue, and since I couldn’t find any other guides on it, I’ll show you a step-by-step process for making a blink animation without the blink slider.
Step 1: The Setup
First you’ll want to setup your scene and open the graph editor.
With those three still selected, create four bookmarks (fourth bookmark is optional, but it adds a nice “bounce” to the motion) in the graph editor by moving the playhead and pressing “M” on your keyboard. Make sure that the first three are spaced fairly evenly. The last one can be a bit further away from the others.
Step 2: The Animating
Place the playhead over the second bookmark and use the sliders to make it look like the model’s eyes are closed. It’s important to note though that not every model is the same, so make sure to experiment a lot with the sliders till you get something that looks good. A good rule of thumb is to make sure that none of the white from the eyes is visible in the key pose and that your “multi_CloseLid” value is enough to look natural.
Also please note that most blinking is done by the upper eyelids, not the lower. I’ve seen plenty of SFM animations where the eyelids just sort of meet at the middle, and it doesn’t look too natural unless the subject is squinting.
Make sure to preview your animation and make any adjustments if necessary. Now adjust the timing of the blink by moving the bookmarks left or right (not all the bookmarks at the same time, but each bookmark individually). The average blink is going to be pretty fast, so make sure you keep the bookmarks relatively close together unless you purposely want a slower blink.
Your blink should look something similar to this now. Normally I would do further work on something like this, so feel free to edit those tangents however you want.
Thanks for Reading this Guide!
Disclaimer alert, I don’t know if this method will work for every model out there, as different models may have different sliders or just use actual bones on the face instead. However, I hope this guide taught you a bit about how the general process works at least, and if you have a model with different sliders or bones, hopefully you can apply the overall process to it as well.
Thanks for reading!
