Eye Shading and Rigging - Video Tutorial

Hi guys, I made a video tutorial that describes in detail how I usually create the eye shaders for my CG characters.


The scene file includes the final rig that allows to move the specular highlights around independently from the eyes position. By scaling the main controls it's also possible to increase or decrease the intensity of the specular highlights and by scaling the secondary controls it's possible to control the blurriness of the highlights.

enjoy!

movie

scene files and textures

An outer NURBS sphere is mapped on the transparency with a ramp.
The sphere is mapped on the incandescence with a highlight texture (a white dot on a black background) mapped with 3d projection (set to either sphere or ball).
The 3d texture can be rotated to rotate the specular highlights around.
Inside the sphere I placed polygonal mesh with a custom shader assigned to it.
The shader consists in a layered texture that combines a hand painted texture with a maya ramp.
The maya ramp is mapped in the color offset with the out color of a ramp shader set to normalized brightness.
The ramp shader's purpose is to add a little bit of color variation on the brighter side of the iris.