Eye Caramba for V4 and M4

Jonstark

Jonstark said:

Man I can't stop looking at those eyes in all the renders in this thread, they really are stunning and add a TON of realism to the render.  The eyes truly are the windows to the soul.

For anyone curious, the Eyedeas product has a ton of morphs built in, you can really change a lot about the shape of the iris, whether it's open/shut, the shape of the cornea, etc.  I'm just barely getting to know it, but so far it looks like a really good product.

 

stringtheory9 said:

Edinburgh it is!  The V4 texture is Tiffany (MRL). I didn't really do anything special on the skin textures.  I think the credit goes to the texture artists and to some free HDRI maps I downloaded (and of course the Carrara render engine). For the very top image I used Abandoned.hdr and the rest foyer.hdr from this free collection: https://gumroad.com/l/hdris2?_ga=2.114207815.1502539852.1510122622-849884022.1462692821 These were the only light sources in the scenes.

Under GI you'll need to turn the lighting quality up to best and the accuracy to 4 or you'll get some really bad artifacts. For Abandoned.hdr I cranked the GI Intensity up to 400. I also used a specular map for the shininess but if I remember correctly it didn't really change the render very much. I also did a dab of color balancing and level adjustements in Photoshop.

Here are the settings I used:

Thanks Stringtheory, interesting approach.  Already doing some testing of using the spec map in the shininess channel.  Was surprised by how high the bump amplitude was.  I guess these things depend a long on how sensitive and what the colors the texture maps for the character are.

Dartanbeck

jonstark, glad to turn you on to the EYEdeas 3+! I really like them too - can't really do without them anymore.

What I do is to shape Genesis first, then copy the size of one of the eyes in the motion tab. Notice, however, that unlike EYEdeas, Genesis eyes are not entirely spherical. Two of the axis' measurements are the same. I click one of those and hit enter, which now selects the entire number, not just a rounded value. Now I paste that into any of the axis size values for EYEdeas with Uniform checked (it is checked by default).

Then I select Genesis' right eye, then (Ctrl + Click) the (still not parented) right EYEdea, then Ctrl + K to align them. Repeat this for the left eyes and then parent them.

Looks to me that, somehow those lacrimals are catching way too much light. Perhaps they have too high of a value in Highlight? Otherwise, sometimes I find that I get too high of brightness in colors when Gamma Correction = 2.2 is applied, which would also include Luxrender and/or Octane and/or Iray, etc.,

In those cases my first stop attempt to quickly reduce the brightness is to multiply the color texture map by itself to make it half as bright. It seemed to me to be a better option in lowering brightness than to reduce the brightness slider, which I think also desaturates. 

Also make sure that you're using bump on them, which will help to block light from just passing straight across their surface.

When using EYEdeas, Lacrimals tends to be the only thing left using that sclera map on the Genesis figure, so tweak it however you like. I think my V4 character uses the same shader for Sclera and Lacrimal, since I use the extra reflection surface to handle the shininess and reflections for the Sclera and leave the actual white of the eye with very little highlight and tweak the shininess to suit the lacrimals, since the whites don't need the attention anymore. But since the reflection layer is only really need for the sclera, I can mediate that to work with the sclera/lacrimal shader as well - going back and forth to find a favorite setting. 

Stringtheory, this is a truly wonderful thing you've done here! Oh... I think I said that a few times already. Oh well... I said it again!

stringtheory9

Thanks Dart, I'm just happy I can add a little to the huge amount of knowledge and helpfulness that you and so many others pour into this forum.

Jonstark, for reasons I don’t understand (although I’m sure there’s a good one) bump maps respond about 4 times less intensely to HDRI illumination than they do to scene lighting that lights the surface at the same intensity. 

 

Chris Fox Art

Thanks a lot for this post!
I'll have to fully read it later but i always thought that there are two kind of things that are a bit harder to look realistic. The first was the eyes, i see many great artists, very realistic skin textures but than the eyes doesnt got much realism.
The second thing is the hair, most of the modeled hairs doesn't look realistic as well, even if the textures are great this was always not that easy to let the hair looks natural.
So i am thankful for the dynamic hair on Carrara as it is a nice tool to get as realistic as it can get and will also looks more natural but i am often also wondering how other artists make realistic hair who doesn't use hair generators to produce some hair and thinking about trying out different ways to create hair for the models that looks more natural and realistic.

Dartanbeck

I've been kicking around the same thought. Time to rethink conforming hair. Currently it's still all painted strips of paper hanging from the scalp. I am going to try a different approach. But you're right. Carrara's dynamic hair is second to none for realistic looking results.

Chris Fox Art

I often use the same settings for my eyes similar to the skin but here also it's a matter on the background image what exactly settings i use as some HDRI images have a big effect on the eyes.

These are my settings for iris, sclera and pupil and the other file shows the settings for eyesurface.

Textures i often use from Genesis 2 The Eyesurface have a reflection map in the alpha

magaremoto

good hints everyone, thanks

Dartanbeck

Sweet render, Chris!

Jonstark

Dartanbeck said:

Sweet render, Chris!

It really is excellent, deserves to be blown up to full size.  :)