In lack of a proper update, here's something I just made. Tonight I suddenly had the idea to make a simple and reusable eyeball setup, which I, well, did.
I wanted to keep it portable, so all the materials are procedural. It's basically a sphere with a black and white ramp for transparency and an iris with a layered shader that blends together a stretched fractal shader and a green to brown ramp. In addition, there's another layered shader with a fractal shader and a spherical ramp in the reflection pass.
The rotation of the eyeball is controlled by an aim constraint, and the iris controller activates two blend shapes. I could have optimized it to use only one blend shape, but on the other hand, I'd only spent 15 minutes on that one so far and I was positivley shocked by the result already.
Following my nature of chasing shiney things when I have nothing else to do, I decided to do something else instead of optimizing the blend shape issue. Since I'm mostly working on video games and this setup isn't really game ready, I tried to apply the blend shape trick to a lowpoly mesh. I used the highpoly version to bake the normal and color map, added a loop around the pupil which I'd need for animating the dilation, and set up two blend shapes again (I know I should have used only one this time, but as I said, shiny things > responsibility, sometimes).
The whole thing worked like a charm, and even if not every game engine supports blend shapes, I could achieve the same effect with a single joint inside the eyeball, that's parented to it's corresponding eye joint.
Enough with the talk, here's a video to demonstrate. Left side is high poly, right side is low poly.
I've also started working on a bone driven facial rig a few weeks ago, and I guess I could combine the two. Ignore the retarded animations please.
I wanted to keep it portable, so all the materials are procedural. It's basically a sphere with a black and white ramp for transparency and an iris with a layered shader that blends together a stretched fractal shader and a green to brown ramp. In addition, there's another layered shader with a fractal shader and a spherical ramp in the reflection pass.
The rotation of the eyeball is controlled by an aim constraint, and the iris controller activates two blend shapes. I could have optimized it to use only one blend shape, but on the other hand, I'd only spent 15 minutes on that one so far and I was positivley shocked by the result already.
Following my nature of chasing shiney things when I have nothing else to do, I decided to do something else instead of optimizing the blend shape issue. Since I'm mostly working on video games and this setup isn't really game ready, I tried to apply the blend shape trick to a lowpoly mesh. I used the highpoly version to bake the normal and color map, added a loop around the pupil which I'd need for animating the dilation, and set up two blend shapes again (I know I should have used only one this time, but as I said, shiny things > responsibility, sometimes).
The whole thing worked like a charm, and even if not every game engine supports blend shapes, I could achieve the same effect with a single joint inside the eyeball, that's parented to it's corresponding eye joint.
Enough with the talk, here's a video to demonstrate. Left side is high poly, right side is low poly.
I've also started working on a bone driven facial rig a few weeks ago, and I guess I could combine the two. Ignore the retarded animations please.
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