Eyes are Important!

In the earlier stages of my model, all I had for eyes were two spheres with bitmaps assigned to them. This did the job for filling in the space, but did leave the model feeling rather dead. The bitmap was crudely created using a photograph of my iris and some quick Photoshopping.

After doing a little research into how more realistic eyes are built, it turns out it is better to make them more or less anatomically correct. This meant modelling the eye, the iris and the lens. The eye shape was made from a capsule shape that had been edited so there were no triangles in the geometry. The front was then flattened where the iris map would go. The lens was then made by squashing a smaller sphere and placing it in front of the eye.

In the image below it is clearer how the eye has been put together. The lens becomes much clearer after rendering.

Using arch & design materials gave them better reflectivity and used Fresnel reflections making the eye look more alive. The same bitmap was used for the iris as before. The lens was then made almost transparent which completed my eye v2.0!