Hi.
I just saw that ‘Desperaux’ movie and was really attracted to the eyes.
How would you make eyes so that you can achieve such corneal effects and caustics?
How many parts to each eye are there? An eyeball? A corneal/scleral shell? A lens object? A pupil depth cup?
How are the UV’s laid out for this? How much space in the UV quadrant should such eyes occupy? Would that space allotment change depending on whether you were planning a close-up, a medium or a long shot?
Just curious.
Thanks.
~S.~
all of that is done with shaders. I believe they even used a procedural shader for the iris as well. So there isn’t a set of UV space allotted to it. It’s all done mathematically
Personally, I’ve used a shell over the eyeball, an deep pupil and modeled cornea to get the kind of eye effects you mention. Alternately, you can cheat a little with concentric spheres (the outer one being clear) and then build your cornea on the inner one by flattening and coloring, and making a conic depressing on the center of the pupil to give depth. Gently raise the surface of the outer sphere (perhaps with the the standard brush) to get a slightly convex lens shape and you should seem some highlights from the lens in render as well.
Cheers,
-K
Model the cornea & pupil separately in that case, or assign polygroups. 
(I’ve used polygroups to assign materials and a radial shader to give the cornea some variance.) Morphing can be used to vary pupil size.
-K
Thanks, Kerwin and Goast.
Very interesting. Is there a ZBrush or Maya workflow tutorial for setting up eyes with shaders?
~S.~
You can pick up some ideas here: http://www.3dluvr.com/rogueldr/tutorials/eye/eyes.html
and here:
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/zbc/showthread.php?t=11225
Thanks, Kerwin!
Exactly what I was looking for. This forum rocks.
~S.~