How to make Batman’s eyes glow,
animate Spider-Man webs/eyes with Lego
Three of the most asked questions in this server are “how do I make Batman’s eyes glow?”,
“how do I animate Spider-Man’s webs?” and “how do I animate Spider-Man’s Eyes?” this
is a quick guide for all of these.
1. Spider-Man Webs
First download the Spider-Web rig made by Qwouz. It can be found here:
https://discord.com/channels/608011253742305310/608012283964293148/1006590
003360583760
Or here if you want to support Qwouz, here: https://qwouzi.gumroad.com/l/BrickEssentials
Let’s now append the spider-web. In the file you want to work in, go to File -> Append.
Navigate to the file you downloaded.
Go to collections and click Spider-Web
You should now have this in your scene.
Click the BezierCurve object in your outliner and go into Edit mode.
Once in edit mode select the Draw tool.
You can now draw webs of varying sizes, next let’s make them usable.
Zoom into one of the end points of the web and select the middle point of the curve handle.
Press Control + H to add a hook to the end and select Hook to New Object. This adds an empty
object to the end of the web, and we can use this to move the web by moving the empty. Do this on
both sides and you now have a start and an end of your web. You can add multiple in between if you
want more control.
Now for Spider-Man’s eyes.
Spider-Man Eyes
For Spider-Man’s eyes we can use a rig created by fellow Blenderbrick’s user CJ, who you may know
from his Spider-Man vs Rhino animation. This already has instructions made for it so refer to them
here:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Y5iBojpgkh1k55aGyDKHkc_7LqFhhPQ5?usp=drive_link
Batman Eyes
For Batman’s eyes there are multiple ways to achieve glowing eyes. I will show you two methods.
Method 1 – Emission Texture on Face
For this method I’m going to make an emission texture which is the face texture, but everything is
black, except the eyes which are white, ensure they’re white so you can change the colour later.
In Blender, on Batman’s head material, create a setup that looks like this.
Key:
1 - UV Map, This node needs to match the UV Map the face uses, you may need to change this if
it doesn’t line up properly
2 - Image Texture node – Place your emission texture in here
3 - Colour ramp use this node to adjust the level of emission in the texture. It can also be used
to change the colour.
4 - Multiple node – Use this to adjust the strength of the emission, the bigger the number, the
more “glowy” it will be
5 - Mix shader/Eevee Shader, this is the main mix shader that comes with all Mecabricks
models, plug the “shader” output of either of these into the top of a mix shader node.
6 - Emission node, plug the output of this into the bottom of the mix shader node
7 - Plug the mix shader node into the material output node
You should now have something that looks like this
Method 2 – Mecaface
One problem with the first method is that you don’t get very much facial expression.
This next method uses the Mecaface add-on created by Citrine’s Animations to allow for extra facial
expressions. For this I’m going to modify the original face texture again but this time I will make the
eye strip black and use this in place of the original texture. To do this, click the decoration node and
press TAB, or press the icon, and change the image texture to the new one.
Now add Mecaface to the head. Disable the eyes by pressing the Eye icon and camera icon to
prevent it from rendering the eyes as we will not be needing them.
Select either eyebrow in the outliner (BrowL or BrowR) and go into its material
Then simply delete the shader node and add in an emission node instead. Now you can modify the
facial expressions of Batman whilst also having them glow.
