“Here’s Looking at You?” No? Then how about “The Eyes Have It”?

I always wanted to try to see if I could pull off a decent looking human eye render, and recently had the chance for an animation project which gives an overview of a particular disease of the cornea—the clear outer layer of the eye. I started with a Daz3d model and a high res map that I purchased for it. The eye needed to blink, so I exported 2 states of the eye from Poser; one opened, one closed, then imported both models using the plugin Riptide, which is useful for importing and exporting .obj files to and from Cinema 4D. I used the morph tag to keyframe the blinks, by linking the 2 states of the model into the tag.

I found I needed to re-build the eye from scratch in order to get the level of detail I needed for the closeups in the animation. I was able to take the high res maps of the eye that came with the maps I purchased, and edit them in photoshop to get more detail and a displacement map as well as an AO map out of them. I also needed to animate the disease state of the eye (not shown here) gradually developing on the cornea. Once the eye ball was modeled, I was able to rig the pupil and iris to dilate, again using the morph tag.

The model I was working with had a really low res solution to the eye lashes, just a few overlapping planes with an alpha-channel lash map on it that broke up when you got too close. I fixed this by modeling a lash and cloning it along an extracted path from the edge of the eyelids via the mograph cloners. I used the random and step effectors to make the lashes look less regular and scale down across the eye.

I also used the chanlum shader and vreel skin in the luminance shader of the eye to get some sub-surface translucency.

Although there are some issues, like the skin map being a bit too low res at super close distances, and not being able to control the reflections on the cornea as much as I’d like, I was quite happy with the results.

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