I am creating my first character and I would like to make her eyes beautiful. Are there any tutorials or utilities to do this? Thanx

It really depends on your texture maps...Blackheart here in the Market place has wonderful set of eyes for V1 and V2..if you want to buy them.....Sharen

easiest way is to use a digital camera then tweak the color in your favorite paint package

Attached Link: http://www.silverleifstudios.com/gallery/tutorials/brushtutorial/gvclass.htm

Yes actually there is. I used this when I started creating eyes, but have since added my own technique to it, but it's a great tut.

Are blackheart's eyes suitable for commercial use or are they only for renders?

Attached Link: http://my.en.com/~kimo/eyemap-tut.html

here is another one.

http://www.antropus.com/english/tutoolho1.htm here is a good tutorial anyway i suggest to only learn from it then try to find your own style and stick to it/improve it. beware though, some popular characters such as v2 has an unfriendly mapping for eyes (on a 2000x2000 HEAD map, lost in a small corner..so you either choose undetailed eyes, but a "small" file size, or you enlarge it to 4000x4000 and have detailed eye but to the cost of a huge texture) I rather like to work on characters who have separate map for eyes, or simply (when i will finish to understand the advices blackhearted IMed me) make a smartprop for eyes and mmap it as you like (seems to be the best method once it i done)

the problem with most tutorials is that YOU CHOOSE since start the olor of the eye you are painting. on my custom eyes i decided to rather depend on a combinaision of layers and operators, and have a layer only for BASEcolor, that i can change whenever i like. it is part of a challenge.. also on the software i use, there is NO radial blur the kind of PSP/PS :( (even more challenging) i am still working on improving them all the days

riddokun, That's what I do as well. Except that I use 2 different colour layers and I can adjust that per eye. It allows me to get some more extreme eyes when I want. This image is from the free Eyes of Soul update I did to fit the V3 textures to LaRoo. I used 2 different colours to get the multi colour effect.

Hmmm i thought recently to use two layers for color, because of some shading/tone that was not satisfying with a singel color tone... i yet did not try it cause i need more basic understanding of layer's operators on my software, but i think this is a solution, i just also need to think of what knd of secodn color may benefit to the first according to tone however in my actual system, there is a strange thing: two "similar looking" color tones that are yet different un the values of rgb (same for eyes, not same for computer)e really gives out strange and different results... by now what i need is tutorials and explnaiations about good iris pattern/detail because i need to improve this :(

I had that same problem LuLuLee, I hunted for ages for suitable royalty free pix, then I thought, I'd use my digital camera and take pix of my own eyes, not an easy thing... out of 12 pix i got one... The result was pretty good... I made about 15 colours out of them.. The one is the pic above is with no colour change. So they are my actual eyes... hehe.. I used a reflection map also! If you need anymore help I would gladly give any I can.. I'll even run around with my digital camera taking pix of people eyes hehehe.... ;) I am also working on my first V3 texture set (one make up is in the pic) Just started set number 2, needed a break from the 1st one.. lol Good Luck, can't wait to see what your doing! -SimderZ-

Thanks to everyone for all of your great help. I really appreciate it.

Simderella, that is really nice. Sharen

Wow Xianah, beautiful eyes! :o) :] Fish

simderella i really like those ! i have problemes myself with reflection maps "for eyes" specifically, as well as make detailed iris pattern :( as for taking pictures.. dont have camera and my eyes are black :) but i would be interested to see a step by step display of your method/technics, can give me basic understanding and idea

Thanks :) I'll see what I can do

On V3 i took a picture of my front bay windows, on a sunny day, played around with the pic in photoshop, made it black and white also. Then put in on V3's cornea, with the 4 colours set like this Black, Black, Black, White (this is in Pro Pack) Set the highlight to 100% no tex map and the reflection map set at between 45-70% Its really just playing around until you get the desired effect. -SimderZ-

what i wanted to achieve is put my handpainted reflect bubbles in a reflection map. as a reflection map wraps around an item it distorts all... so far i found a filter/plugin that distort a 2d texture into what it will look once wrapped around a sphere(filter "sphere" of my paint software) but i do not find the "reversal" filter: means painting a 2d pattern.reflect as i want it to appear once wrapped around the eye THEN with a filter, 2dize it in the reflection map logics...