[Aniki]

very real indeed. just the white area around the iris could be a tad bigger, dont you think ?

looking forward to higher res and sl images as well !

cheers

Aniki

[philip99]

hello,
very fine work, the eye render can be useful for IRIDOLOGY charts

[sidenimjay]

http://www.behance.net/paronsuren/Frame/428809

some super close up hi rez photos of eyes ..... for verification!

[Lars Magnusson]

Thanks! I hope I will get time this evening to start with the textures, or at least test what settings I need for iris and sclera roughness.
(I spent yesterday evening making backups of my work laptop after a coworker got a HD crash....got me worried )

@Aniki: You mean more white less red? That will depend on what type of render I'll use it in. Pretty human or creepy monster
Or if you mean the size of the iris? I think I got it right from the wiki's and medical sites I checked. Adult human eye has a diameter of 24-25mm, and the Iris diameter is about 11mm.

@sidenimjay: Great ref photos...although some looked creepy...the matte brown ones in particular! Didn't know an iris could be spongy? I thought it was always variations of the stringy surface. like nr 4 on that page?

[Lars Magnusson]

Reason that bump didn't work in previous render was that I only put it on the highroughness color BSDF.....not globally or on specularity BSDF.... silly me

[Lars Magnusson]

Ok, have spent a lot of time experimenting with specularity (roughness) and bump maps.
And also got slightly sidetracked over at the ZBrush forum with some fun tests/discussions about displacement mapping between ZBrush and Maxwell


Eye Test 5 by LarsMagnusson, on Flickr

To make sure that I wasn't spending a lot of time creating textures and materials that only worked in my test scene I decided to move the eyes to a more familiar scene

Still a lot to do with the iris...handpainting all those "streaks" was really booooooooooooooring!
And to get the iris to look realistic was much harder than I first believed.
I think that my only chance to ever finish (and actually use the eyes in a sculpt) is to have a simplified iris like this.
(tried to paint some of the strange iris formations as shown in sidenimjay's link, but couldn't get it to look right, one day I might try to highres sculpt a 100% realistic eye like that in zbrush and render with displacement, but don't hold your breath for that one )

And of course, there are no blood vessels at all here. So it looks like a clean toy eye

[NicoR44]

I think it looks great already Lars!

[Half Life]

Reminds me of Blade Runner

Care to share any notes about displacement from Zbrush to Maxwell?

Best,
Jason.

[Lars Magnusson]

Thanks guys!

@Half Life:
I think you can enter the ZBrush forum threads without login:
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread ... post713947

A couple of posts down in my ClawSnake thread we started the displacement discussions.
(with screenshots of settings in both ZBrush and Maxwell)

You probably already know most of what we talked about, but if you have follow up questions we could perhaps start a displacement thread here in the Maxwell forum? It might be of use for others?

I'm slightly ashamed that it took me so long to figure out in one of the tests that I needed much higher precision
(Since I export my ZBrush sculpts into Maxwell at a rather high polygon count I rarely have to go above 16-30...)
And one of the guys discovered that doing the object smoothing angle in Maya and then export mxs to maxwell gave better results than using Maxwell's smoothing. Not a problem for me since I don't mind exporting highdensity meshes, but maybe others here?
(since displacement visibly breaks up if smoothing angle isn't sufficient )

[Lars Magnusson]

ZSketchHead1 by LarsMagnusson, on Flickr

Wanted to test the eye's I made before doing more work on them.
(same eyes as my previous post, with indented iris to fake caustic effect and global illumination turned off for the external cornea-object )
EDIT: ...or so I thought...I later resumed the render and couldn't understand why the SSS got less and less noisy but not the eyes...turned out that global illumination was ON for the cornea...as my previous tests showed, that will take long to cook! )

So I made this quick sculpt in ZBrush 4.
Ok, the ZSketch part and first clay brush sculpting was quick, but it took me a couple of days to re-learn and test how to use retopology to get a cleaner mesh and the new ProjectAll functionality to project highdensity sculpting on the new mesh.

Here using a HDRI environment that came with Maxwell2 and same SSS settings as for my ClawSnake.
Exported the 100'000 poly version of the sculpt into Maxwell and used displacement map to get the detail from the 1.7million poly mesh in ZBrush.
Currently, the only detail is the brushstrokes from the clay brushes.

It's only SL7, 40min render. I interrupted it because I wanted to play some more Mafia2

[NicoR44]

Looking great Lars!! the eyes really do the trick! btw, I see you love planes too!

[Bubbaloo]

Looks great! The eyes are the most important part of creature creation. They can make or break the realism. The rest of the sculpting can be superb, but if the eyes aren't completely believable, the rest will fail.

[Lars Magnusson]

Thanks guys, and yes, the eyes are extremely important...and difficult to get right
Hopefully you wont be too disappointed when you see future updates...because I made a mistake (edited desription in previous post) and it looks like I DIDN'T turn off global illumination for the cornea ...that's why the eyes are so dark compared to my previous simball(eye)-scene render.
I did a quick test with it turned off and it renders much faster, and the sclera is whiter and iris more light blue.

@NicoR44:
Yep, planes and helicopters are great fun! On sunday there is a flightshow that me and my brother is going to visit if the weather isn't too bad
And when I was younger I had a huge passion for flightsimulators too, nothing as fancy as what your signature-link shows, but I did have the programmable Thrustmaster F22 stick, throttle and pedals.
No flight-sims the last couple of years though, for a couple of reasons:
1. Same reason I could never be a real pilot...a highly multitasking brain is needed...keeping track of multiple enemies is a pain
2. After missions that took a long time to complete...I tended to crash when I landed....the ground was my primary enemy

[Lars Magnusson]

Friendly Alien - WIP by LarsMagnusson, on Flickr

SL 9.54 , 1h42min. SSS and Displacement.
And this time I remembered to switch off global illumination for the eye cornea object.

The time between this and last render has been spent on playing Mafia II, first on Normal then Hard difficulty...
(strange how it can be fun driving cars from the 40's and 50's that struggle to reach highway speeds..slightly disappointed that it didn't support PC steering wheel.... wouldn't like to drive my own car with a gamepad )

But this sunday I finally spent some time experimenting with the sculpt.
Added teeth and reshaped the mouth a bit. Started experimenting with the skinfolds...far from finished, and don't have any plan or goal for the final look, just having fun with it

He,he... kind of weird that in my Eye Design thread...there isn't much work done on the actual eye

[big K]

still looks very good,...

...but doesn´t switching off GI for the eyes makes them look different now.
the result with GI seems more convincing.