I'm still a relative newbie to making character sets, but here's what worked for me when it comes to breaking up that horrible hard line around the iris: 1. I completely scrapped the idea of the painted-on reflection in all forms; 2. reworked the cornea trans map so it was essentially a black spot on a white background with a blurred edge, working from SnowSultan's seam guides to make sure it was solid white around the markings for where the cornea and sclera meet, and fading relatively quickly into black; 3. painted a 'ring' of a fairly neutral gradation color along that line that defines the cornea edge and sclera edge. What you're essentially doing is this: instead of just making the whole cornea transparent except for the cutout reflections, you're keeping it visible around the rim of the iris to cover that 'solid line' around the iris that would appear otherwise. You can still do the same cutout reflection approach, admittedly, if you're really careful about drawing that 'fade' line on the cornea/sclera part. I found that the best way to figure how to place it all was to look at SnowSultan's seam guides. Seriously, I cannot possibly appreciate these more, since all of the eye markings are very detailed and clearly explained. He has that line between the cornea and sclera material zones marked. I make a selection along that line, create a new layer in photoshop, stroke the (empty) selection along the inside of your selection *and then stroke again along the center*, and blur as needed (usually hit it with some noise and such to break up the evenness of it a little, too). On a new layer, still keeping that same selection, I'll contract the selection by a certain amount (depends on what my total image size is, usually around 10 pixels) then fill with black, deselect, and hit that black spot layer with gaussian blur (I used around .5 as a setting) to soften its edges. It's now given me a good trans spot that's inside the edge of the cornea material zone that will be clear over the iris, and fade towards its join with the cornea. (Create an all-white fill layer behind this for your transmap, of course. *grin*) It sounds a lot more complicated than it is, probably. *grin* I'm awful when it comes to explanations, but I'll try to get a few screencaps of what I mean if necessary. This is the effect it comes out with, more or less (see above). Ahem: quick edit, by 'horrible line' I mean the one we're all plagued with solving, because it's evil to work with.

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It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye texture.