Correcting the Issues

Wow it seemed like such a long time ago I was looking at this model. Time away has been beneficial I think considering I can now look at my model and see just how flawed it is! To start with I began pulling out the vertices around the jaw and cheek areas. My model was rather thin and needed filling out a lot and also the egg head needed to go!

I had a few disasters with the UVW mapping and so I made full use of my friend Autoback!

After playing with the actual head model to make it more lifelike I had another go at the eye which was slightly more successful than before to say the least!

I watched a couple of youtube tutorials and remade the model of the eye using some of the techniques I had picked up on modeling the Finchingfield animation. I created a white, inverted iris, pupil and cornea. 

I then added materials, manipulating the specular for the white of the eye, using UV map for the iris bitmap (which I used a lot in the group project!) I also gave the pupil self-illumination so that it did not reflect the light source that I placed in the scene and made the cornea transparent.

When placing the eyes back into the head I realised that put them into the correct position I needed to significantly alter the eyelids. I did this and quickly ran into the issue of not having a eyelid 'lip' on which eyelashes sit. I tried to modify the head model but of course the UVW mapping was affected and so as a way around this issue I created a separate eyelid lip, connecting it to the eye via the vertex snapping tool  and also added turbo smooth to that so that it fit perfectly against the head model.

This is how the eyes looked in the end

I also toned down the specular map in photoshop by adjusting the opacity of the highlights I had created. Just these small but significant changes made a dramatic change to my model. 

After making the eyes look a little better I then added a lookat constraint onto each eye so that I could manipulate them independently and together to achieve some animation in the face.