colortwist

Eye see you

Added 2019-08-28 07:03:43 +0000 UTC

Excessive yak shaving can take you on a really weird journey sometimes.

So a little while ago I basically got annoyed at the way some of my skin was looking in a few scenes (hint: it wasn't the skin, it's probably the scene lighting). After chasing that down and promptly realizing that the way I had things before was probably best, I started going through a few of the other shaders and cleaning up some extraneous cruft that had accumulated over the months.

I've never been particularly happy with the way the eyes looked, especially given that they were a holdover asset from a long time ago. They weren't particularly very optimal geometry wise (at least, not for a layered cornea/sclera/iris setup), and the original surface shaders left me scratching my head wondering what the hell I was thinking back then. Around the same point in time I figured it wouldn't be too hard to try and overhaul them, and since it was something on my "list of stuff to do before the sequence is complete", I figured I might as well give it a go and see what happened.

These are the result.

Surprisingly, I'm not entirely sure if I'm happy with these ATM. I think they're better than what I had (which was literally just a stack of layered textures on a single flat surface). These ones at least bother with a proper cornea lens and the iris is technically 3D as well, in that it has a high resolution displacement map on it which was scanned from a real human iris. Unfortunately Arnold doesn't seem to support caustics all that well so depending on the lighting angle I almost wanna say they look a bit too flat, but I'm told this tends to happen IRL as well (especially in diffuse lighting conditions), so maybe I'm just splitting hairs over nothing.

In any case, yeah... New eyeballs and stuff. Insert obligatory Minority Report reference here.