I've just downloaded THE EYEBUILDER by Bobbie25 and found it really good for make your own eyeball textures but I need to add some glossy and relfection poses to them for that realistic effect.

Any one know of the best way to do this or point me in the right direction of a good tutorial?

thanks

ok, looks a bit too primative but I suppose I can play around with the opacity and blend the dots in. I did wonder if there was anything a little more photo-realistic out there. I'm also very interested about adding glossyness to the eye, if anyone has some ideas on this matter, it'll be great. cheers

well, I do know that there are some transmaps for the outer eye available.....some here in freestuff I think even. They help alot. Of course if you are working with p5, you could also add glossiness in the materials room.

sighs painting highlights on the eyes will eventually result in a mismatch between image lighting and faked lighting. Better idea not to do it. Lighting effects on the eyes should be done by means of material settings and reflective maps on the lCornea and rCornea. Which is fact why they were created.

i am truly flattered and i would say to get good highlights is to add them in poser or your 3d program

I like the eyes to be flat without painted on highlights because, as Lyrra mentioned, there will be a mismatch. What I do is render it without worrying too much and then draw the highlight that you did after it is rendered. It saves so much time and effort trying to light the eyes perfectly to het the desired highlights.

Lyrra- I agree with you in principle, but I've never found an explanation anywhere for how to get reflection maps to work on the eyes. Yours is the first message I've ever found which even identifies which eye parts should receive the materials adjustments. But... that still leaves all of us (or, well, at least me) in the dark about how the materials settings should be set and which reflection maps might give the most realistic effect. Any suggestions?

Thanks, Tguyus

After reading all of your posts (some great ideas here, thanks for pointing me in the right direction) I've decided to purchase Btsculptor's head tutorial and try and get my head round it this weekend. I'm a bit of a freshman at this and and don't use the material room as often as I should ( that room scares me a bit cus I don't understand to well) but hopefully the tutorial will help me Nice one peeps

.... um ... generally I don't bother actually. I don't do up close portraits, so its not neccasary. Just the Corneal highlights do nicely for midrange to distant shots. These settings should be built into the eye texture MAT files in most cases. in most mil figures the eyes are lCornea, rCornea, lIris, rIris, lPupil and rPupil. Eye texture is applied to the iris, pupil doebn't need one (diffuse set to black) lCornea & rCornea are these spheres that cover the eyes for the mil figures from 1 up. (v1, v2, milkids, m1, m2, v3, m3, etc etc ad nauseum) Theye were developed to add reactive highlights to the eyes, that would not be affected by the textures, and were easily changed. material settings should be something like this: across the top - white, black, black, white highlight 100 both middle trans sliders at 100 and that should work in most cases (Bryce users can set these to glass1 for good effect) for a reflection map, well really whatever you like. A picture, a simple shape like a lit window, whatever. apply that to the reflection map in the middle right. Experiment with different maps to see how things look. This is very reactive to your lighting angle and the colour of both the refl image and the iris underneath. Needless to say dark eye colors tend to show highlights more strongly.

oh those settings are POser4 material settings

Bleh Alternate SPECULAR of course. Can't edit with pictures attached, unfortunately :o(

Poser 5 folks, just plug a "glossy" (New node > Lighting > Specular > Glossy) into the Alt Diffuse of the eyeballs material. This will give highlight that responds to scene lighting. You can use the "roughness" to control how big the highlight is and sharpness to blend the edges. The Ks setting sets how strong the gloss effect is.

Thanks for all the tips! I'll have to see how best to work these ideas into P4/PP and Vicky 2. cheers...