Eyes

Having never modeled an eye before I am just going to try my luck and see how it turns out as I really want to get onto the hair modifier as personally I think this will make more of an impact on my model if I run out of time.

Here are images depicting  how I created the eye;

Firstly I created a sphere and flattened one of the sides for which to attach the Iris and the pupil to. I then created the flattened sphere required for the iris.

Originally I had planned to select an eye bitmap from the Internet although I thought the for continuity’s sake I should use my own eye, or the iris colouring at the very least to match my eyes as closely as possible. As I said, this was my first time modeling an eye and perhaps in retrospect I should have researched a tutorial for this particular task.

I cut apart the eye image from my original reference photos and extended the white area of my eye and left a little pink around the edges for realism. I then tried to assign this bitmap as a material to the larger of my two spheres. This was problematic. The iris was stretched and distorted across the side of the sphere, with a gap at the back where the bitmap didn’t meet. I tried to rotate the iris into the correct position within the material editor, which was not as easy as I’d hoped creating the effect you see below, and so I tried a different tack.

I decided to cut the original image so that I had the iris and the white of my eye as separate Photoshop files. I then (using the clone stamp tool) enlarged the area of colour so that I could use it to fit onto my objects in 3DS Max as a material. Similar issues occurred as before although due to the bitmaps being largely one colour it wasn’t so imperitive to reduce stretching or requiring specific placement of images on the object. I added a pupil in the same manner and this is the end result of my quick fix eyes.

The eyes do bring the model alive a little more although if I have enough time at the end, they will be my number one priority to work on some more and to achieve a more realistic look.