Eye Balls

After watching a YouTube tutorial (at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zT-fQqLqxII) on how to create a photo realistic eye in 3DS Max, I am convinced that I have a solid project ahead of me.

Above is a screen-cap of the beginning of my production. On the left there are two sliders labelled DILATE (SMALL) & DILATE (LARGE). These sliders are connected to the eye situated next to them. The function of these sliders is to (manually) control the dilation of the pupil of the eye. To achieve this I made two copies of the original eye, modified to the vertices on one to be smaller, and the other to be larger. I then applied the Morpher modifier to the original, and allocated the replicas as targets for the morph. The use of sliders is purely for convenience.

Mapping the eye was no simple task. To begin with, I modeled a hemisphere. Then organised the top vertices accordingly to the proportions I wanted my eye to be. During this process, I was also working on an image for the map of my eye.

The image above is a comparison between an image found on Google, and the image I used as the map for my eyes. The image on the left is the original, and (after some work on Photoshop) the image on the right is the completed version.

To make this eye I cloned the left side and flipped it over to the right as the left side was not affected by reflections. After that, I touched it up using the eraser and clone stamp tool to remove the symmetry and make an improvised, completed version of an eye. Finally I sacrificed some edges and cut out a circle, using the centre of the pupil as my reference point.

The above image is the UV Map from my eye model, this was used to align the dimensions of my eye map to the model, so that it would be positioned correctly in 3DS Max. 

These are the maps used for the final product, the red has been reduced as I felt it's intensity looked too artificial. These were achieved simply with colour layers applied over the original image in Photoshop.

This video is the first (in a long line) of videos that I have rendered, it demonstrates the dilation of the pupil through all it's stages. Starting large, it goes to small, then standard size. I plan on manually adjusting the pupils based on light exposure. 

The above video demonstrates the eye rig connected to a dummy via a 'look-at' constraint, as well as more dilations. The map for the eye is outdated and the current ratios make it a lot smaller and more realistic.