Tutorial: Its all in the Eyes

Eyes

Creating a character is one thing but creating a character in 3d that has depth is another. In life, the eye is a window to the soul. Eyes show inner thought because they have depth to them. At some level we read the eye ball without even knowing how or why certain looks evoke an emotion. We can compare this to body language. We can tell when a human is feeling sad by looking at their "pose" and the way they move slowly and kind of careless. But we can further more tell that they are sad by the way their eyes look and move. The eyes of this sad subject may be more wet because of tears and their movement may be slowed, maybe even timid. Also the eyes will kind of stare at something symbolizing a more focused inner thought. Believe it or not this is all common sense, your mind knows all of these things. However you may have never thought about it consciously.

As 3d artists we have the ability to create photo real images. In that case we must pay great attention to detail when it comes to relating the thought, or emotion that we're trying to convey to our audience. One way to do this is to pay great attention to the eye ball. The most simplest form is a texture map on a sphere. In some small cases this is enough such as background extras, or characters that will be shaded in a special way etc. (click here for an example of a sphere and texture map eye created by me) However I tend to subscribe to the Pixar's belief that the eye needs a lot of attention in order to convey life. To me, a lifeless eye can ruin an image. An artist can model a photo realistic head in 3d but it will look lifeless if the eyes lacks depth.

So how do we create depth? Well like i sad, a sphere with texture map works for some scenes especially if its a more cartoony or stylized character, and its even better if there's a bump map as well. However looking at Pixar's "A Bugs Life, we see a lot of depth in the eyeball. From this we can assume that they didn't use a simple sphere with a texture map. In fact this suggests they've modeled the eye more physically correct. Now I'm no surgeon so I'm not going to chart out the entire structure of an eye. I'm an artist so I'll fake it. That's what we do. One thing to remember is that if it looks good... its good enough.

Before we look at the eye. When I set out to figure out how to make a better eye for my characters i thought about dolls and the way their eyes were shaped and how they looked. You may find that this eye reminds you of older style dolls.

Lets look at the eye

Here's the eye. This eye is more of a "Pixar'ish" kind of eye in that its clean looking. Additional texture maps can make this eye more photo real, such as a pinkish map with some small vein like lines. I like the Pixar look so that's the inspiration for this eye and its shaders.

How real this eye looks depends on 3 factors: the actual geometry, shaders, and lighting. First we'll examine the geometry...

Geometry

The eye is modeled in 4 parts. They are:

• The actual circular structure of the eye white

• Pupil

• Cornea

• Iris

Each of these 4 parts are modeled individually. As you can see I've modeled the eye ball more physically correct in that the iris (the color of the eye) bends inward. This is very important to properly simulate the highlight and diffuse illumination that the iris has in real life. This angle allows the iris to literally catch light.

The Pupil is a simple flat black 2d circle that sits in the iris.

The Cornea is a key component to the eye. It allows us to catch sharp highlights and it gives the eye depth. Actually the combination of the cornea, iris and pupil are what give the appearance of depth but without the cornea this eye would look flat. The cornea is transparent and has a light reflection map. Its main purpose is to catch a sharp highlight

So far our example as been a polygon object. The same thing can be accomplished just fine in b-spline patch surfaces and nurbs. Lets look out a regular b-spline patch version of the eye made in 3dsmax (not a nurbs version)

As you can see the same thing is easily accomplished. Its just a different surface type. I prefer this surface type because it is very resolution independent. The polygon version is a meshsmooth object so i can acheive higher detail levels with the polygon one. The patch one allows me to tesselate down to a very small amount of polys, thus increasing viewport speed when animating interactivly.

Above you can see that i've turned down the patch surface tesselation parameters to 5. this allows realtime interactivity while retaining the ability the eyeballs perfectly smooth with a higher tesselation value. So if i was doing film res stuff... i could easily turn up the step setting so that my eyes dont have any poly facets in them.

The Good and Bad of patch eye ball surfaces.

GOOD:

• Resolution independent

• Fast interactivity

BAD:

• Doesnt work well with FFD's unless you have a lot of patch crossections. Mesh objects have no problem with FFD lattices

• Max has mapping issues with patches in r3 that prevent propper mapping of patches. The only way to get around this is to meshselect above the patch modifier and then map it as a polygon. This works fine as a work around but its not a desired work flow.

Now that we've examined the geometry. We must look further into what makes the eye more real such as lighting. The key to lighting the eye properly is partially in the structure but shaders are just as important.

The Shaders

Shaders and lighting go hand in hand, so in order for the eye to light properly we need to have proper shaders.

Each part of the eye contains a separate shader. There are 4 shaders in all.

• The Eye White shader

  

  The eye white shader simulates a fresnel like reflection where the reflection is more visible around the sides of the object and is less visible head on (although it doesn't look like it, there's is). It has a very high specularity value in order to create a sharp specular reflection.

• Pupil shader

  

  The pupil shader is very simple. Its a flat black color. There is no specularity or shininess settings. It doesn't have an ambient value either. This way it will be black when

  responding to light.

  
  

• Iris shader

  

  The iris shader has a texture map for color. The specular color is a map as well so it lights in a realistic manner. The specular settings are set in a way that you get a wide highlight but not a sharp one.

  
  

• Cornea shader

  

  The cornea shader is almost completely transparent. It has the same specular and shininess settings that the eye white shader has. It also has the same frensel reflection of the eye white shader. This is because they should appear to be all one structure and the highlights and reflections need to behave the same on both surfaces.

Other things to consider

This is very important. If you are using a shadow maps you need to tell the cornea object to not cast a shadow and to not receive them. Its transparent anyway so its ok that it doesn't cast a shadow. If you don't do this the cornea will black out the iris and you wont see the inner eye at all. If you are using ray tracing i suppose you don't have to worry.

Lighting the Eye

Modeling the eye is only a part of creating the illusion of depth. Lighting is the final touch. One must always have at least 1 specular highlight in the eyes. You can usually do this in most rendering software by defining a light source that only effects the eyeballs and further more this light source should only cast specular light. In other words this light will only effect the specularity of the eyeballs. In 3D-Studio Max you can easily do this by creating a light source and toggling the diffuse check box off, in the light source parameters. And don't forget to do "INCLUDE the eyeball objects only" in the light sources exclude/include parameter box

Animating the Eyeballs

Animating the eye is fairly simple. If your in 3D-Studio Max i suggest using the tape measure helper to animate the eye. A very good friend of mine and animation partner, Boris Ustaev came up with this. Its actually a lot better than using the Look at controller in Max. If you're a Maya user, just go ahead and aim constraint the eyes to a null. I suggest constraining each eyeball to its own null, and then constrain those 2 nulls to one. That way you have the ability to animate each eye separately if you need to.

If you'd like to dilate the pupils you can setup a linked xform in Max. This linked xform would be assigned to the vertecies around the inner edge of the iris. You will need to assign the vertecies around the outer part of the pupil as well to a linked xform. And then create a dummy in the middle of the pupil, and use that dummy to control both linked xform modifiers.

source:----------------------------------------------
http://www.3dluvr.com/rogueldr/tutorials/eye/eyes.html