Tutorial: The Eye

[contactx]

There are many techniques that can be used to create an eyeball and I have chosen to explain one that is easy to use and quite effective…

[img]http://www.pixolator.com/images01/EyeTut.jpe[/img]

1. SET UP: Select Sphere3D tool. Select material ToyPlastic .Draw a sphere in the center of your canvas. Press ‘t’ in order to enter edit mode. Open MODIFERS>INTIALIZE submenu. Set mesh resolution to HDivid=256, VDivide=128. Open TOOL>MODIFIERS>SYMMETRY sub menu. Press Z and R with Radial count set to 40. The default-editing tip is very good for feathered (smooth) painting on the object, but because we want to get a texture that will resemble the pattern in the eye, we need to modify the editing tip. Open the TRANSFORM>MODIFIERS submenu and set the curve top resemble the image:STEP 1 . We further want to have the editing tip to be noisy so we set the NOISE slider to maximum.
2. DARK PAINT: In the COLOR menu, select white color and press the FILL OBJECT in order to prep the sphere for painting. Select black color. Set DRAW SIZE=10 , RGB Intensity=10 and turn off ZADD. Draw on the sphere by clicking on the center of the sphere and dragging out untill you get the desired diameter (image:STEP 2)
3. WHITE PAINT: Select white color and draw the outer band. The white band can be added to the inner part of the eye or to the outer radius. (image:STEP 3)
4. MATERIAL: Optional: you can modify the material to reflect an environment map (or any other image). Open the MATERIAL>MODDIFERS, set reflectivity to –30 and change the reflection curve to look like the image:STEP4. We are using negative reflection because it allows the intensity of the reflection to be based on the color intensity of the object. In this case, we want the dark surface of the eye to be more reflective than the white surface, in order to do so, we modify the reflection curve to have high reflectivity for dark colors (left side of the curve) and no reflectivity for bright colors (the right side of the curve).
5. VARIATIONS: Try repeating these steps with varying editing tip curve and noise intensity. Choose varying RGB intensities and DRAW size. As you trying different combination you’ll find that by modifying few controls it possible to get wide range of effects. When you are done, snapshot the eye into the canvas and use the freehand brushed to add some imperfections and character to the eye (The use of free hand brushes is very important to the final quality of the eye).When you creating an image that uses these eyes, I recommend that you snapshot the eyes in a separate layer. This will allow you to easily paint and modify the eyes without impacting the rest of the creature face.

One thing to note (and I am sure most would be aware of that, but nonetheless, its worth mentioning) is that is important to apply the final touchups to the eye after it has been placed within the creature head. An eye that looks perfect by itself may not look good at all when placed in the eye socket. It has to do with the color of the eye, the orientation and size of the pupil. When I create a 3D eye, I get it as far as 80% from completion, the rest (and the most important) 20% , are added while the eye is in place.

I hope you’ll find this helpful
-Pixolator

P.S. There are other ‘Eye’ tutorials that were created by southern and kazbear.
southern and kazbeart: If possible, please post your tutorial (or a link to your tutorial)in this thread.

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[srlake314]

Thank you so much for the info! I love this forumn…Everyone is so helpful.

I can’t see any of the images though.