Creating an eye/eyelid rig for dragon without shape keys I've been creating a dragon lately and now trying to create a rig for my dragon. I've managed to create a basic rig for other body parts of my dragon, but I' m really stuck at creating eye and eyelid rigs as I can't find tutorials of creating them for dragon.

This is how my eye looks like. I've created it by using lattice to stretch it (so it would look like a real dragon eye). The eyelids are separated from the eye itself.

Dragon eye with lattice and eyelids as seperate objects


When I move the eyelid in front view using 3D cursor as pivot point, it moves nicely around the eye, but I can' t understand how to make this work with bones.

Eyelid open



Eyelid closed



The second problem - I can' t make a basic eyerig for this kind of eye, because it is not round and stretched by lattice. Whenever I try to move the eye somewhere using the eyebone in pose mode, it'll look like this. How could I overcome this problem?
Concerning the eye movement, you can use a UVWarp modifier to your eye.



The principle is to set two objects (empties) to shift the position of the UV map of the eye.
Moving (or inserting key frames) one empty will shift the UV map to obtain the result.

Here is a closer view of the modifier :


Edit :
Concerning the eyelid animation, if you set the bone origine at the same position your 3D cursor is (as you said you can rotate it manually), that may work.



Another edit : a rigged version of the eye animation.

The principle is simply to add a "Bone" and define a group named "Bone" for the Iris circle. That allow to play on the position and X-scale of the iris.



The Bone group is the iris / center UVs in the image below :