Since this is my first realistic, human eye, I didn’t think to save images as steps for this post. One of the first problems I had as a new user was figuring out how to create a realistic eye to insert into a face, something I could move according to the sculpture I want to make. One that can have it’s own reflections separate from the skin around it and could also be positioned so if I wanted the subject to look up, left, right or even cross-eyed, if I wanted to. The following steps are my solution. As a back story, I am a trucker and because of that, I work the equivalent of two full time jobs so when I try to learn about something I don’t have much consecutive time I can put into it. I’ve always been an artist and learning CG is the next medium for my art. That being said, I hope this helps another aspiring artist.
- From Lightbox Projects, I chose the Dynamesh064 sphere.
- In Geometry I divided it 4 times to get the sharp resolution.
- In Material I chose toy plastic and made sure the whole sphere was white.
- I left symmetry in the standard left, right mode to save some time, which also created some faults in the image that I kept for a natural look. (After all, on close inspection no eye is really perfect in shape.)
- I used a large draw size with -100 focal shift, not quite large enough to mask out the whole iris, then sharpened the mask 3 times, then inverted it.
- Then to add the natural shape, I used the inflate balloon deformation just a few pixels, I think I settled on 7 but it might have bees less. I tried a few higher ones but didn’t like the results so using control, z undid it until I believed it looked right.
- Using principals I learned in painting and ceramics, I began painting the pupal color just using polypaint on rgb. Don’t use solid black, when a person views the end project, they may not know why but it doesn’t look natural and they will notice it even if they don’t notice it. So, for my plans with the whole picture, I chose a red base color and put my shade choice near black but up just a little bit from the bottom so the red would be there but not obvious. (Selecting the color should be based on what kind of light the sculpture will end up in but any color will do in a pinch as long as it has some color.)
- To keep the dark edge around the iris, I blurred out the mask again 3 times to it’s original edges.
- Then, with the same -100 focal shift, I made my draw size again just a little smaller than the desired size of the pupil and masked it out, again leaving a little room for imperfection. With the dark color I couldn’t actually see the mask but using the circle of the draw size, I knew I was placing it where I wanted. This allowed the muscle lines to have that curved look that is natural.
- To paint the iris itself, I used several base colors starting from the darkest to the lightest all edging around the blue color but varying it with each, I took the draw size down to 1 I began painting in the muscle lines of the iris itself, then used only a few darker colors at the end for just minor touch ups. To make it look natural, the colors have to vary off the desired color on both sides of the desired end color of the iris, occasionally using just a few lines strokes of something totally off the desired end color of the iris.
- My final step was to use the veiny looking alpha and drag rectangle to put the veins on the eye but I didn’t use straight red, it was a little bit off center red toward the yellow and in the shade selector, I also moved it toward the grey.
Then, to keep the color and material in tact, I saved it as a .ZPR file. I hope this helps anyone that wants to make one, happy sculpting everybody!
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