Research & Development for 3D & the Web

This post looks at one of the techniques for creating an eye texture.

This technique uses the smudge tool.

Make a square canvas in Photoshop.

Use CTRL-R to bring up the ruler and hide the ruler.

On the ruler, drag across until you are at the middle of the x and y axis so that you have a guide line intersecting at the exact middle of the canvas.

Circular Marquee – from the middle, hold alt so that it gets created from the center and then hold shift so that it is a perfect circle, all the way to the edges.

Fill the circle with a colour and then create a new layer and do the same with a smaller circle (still holding alt-shift).

Fill with white and then add ‘noise’ through Filter > Noise. Select Gaussian and Monochromatic. Gaussian for bigger noise chunks and monochromatic for only black and white.

Next add a Radial Blur through Filter > Blur > Radial Blur.

Set the amount to 100, blur method to ‘zoom’, quality to ‘best’. Set the layer to ‘overlay’ mode in the layers drop down.

Create a new layer, make another slightly smaller circle and add a black circle in the same way.

Create another layer BELOW the black circle and make another circle slightly larger, choose a solid colour (something bright) and do the same radial blur as before on this layer.

CTRL H to hide the guides.

Next get the smudge tool on the newly radial blurred layer and grab the smudge tool with a strength of about 90 or so and start pulling out bits of colour and make the veins styly looking things. Do a lot of these.

Duplicate the layer and use the transform tool to rotate and scale down a bit the duplicate layer.

Use Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation to adjust the colour slightly to something that looks good and then make the layer an ‘overlay’ layer again so it talks to the layers below it.

You can keep repeating this as much as you need to..

Once done, merge all the layers together.

Because this is going to be put onto a Nurbs surface, we want to make this into a ‘flat map’. This can be done by going to Filter > Distort > Polar Coordinates.

Set it to Polar to Rectangular. This makes a round texture into a flat texture. you may need to paint the bottom colour back in.

Also it might be an idea to put a really soft black line along the bottom of the square (hold shift while you draw for straight line) and put a very faint/soft line edge.

Save this as your Pupil texture.

Create a new white layer on top and paint on some blood-shot random lines with differing strengths/thicknesses and capacities etc. Blur it very slightly to soften it up.

Save this as the eye-blood texture.

For the Eye ball:

In Maya, create a Blinn and plug in a Ramp. So click on the colour file locater and select Ramp. Set the Type to be U-ramp. You can get rid of the green in the ramp most likely. For the blue area, plug in a file instead of the colour and go find the eye blood texture we made.

Tweak the Interpolation to Exponential Up.

For the Eye Lens, Create another Blinn and set the transparency very high. set the colour and spec colour to white and the Eccentricity lower to make it a very shiny bright surface. This will make it kind of like the filmy stuff on the outside of your eye and reflect nicely.

Create another Blinn for the Eye Pupil.

For this one, just plug in the file for the pupil texture we made before. If it comes in backwards, double click on the placement node and in the rotate area, set it to 180 to spin it round.