I'm James Taylor, and today we're going to
look at modeling and texturing very simple eyeballs in Maya. I'm starting with a regular polygon sphere in my creation parameters I want to adjust
my subdivisions from twenty up to 48 and then I'll rotate it along its x-axis just a ninety degree rotation and I'm gonna duplicate it next - so, just CTRL+D to duplicate it then I'll scale that duplicate down by half and this duplicate is going to give us a
reference for this size of our iris I zoom in so I can see that duplicate inside the original and I'll select a bunch of faces along the
front of my object, so that they are about the
same size as the duplicate. We can see that gives us a proper sized iris on the front of the eyeball. Now before
I go further I have to adjust some settings on my scale tools. I'll double-click the scale tool, and then I want to find this 'Prevent Negative Scale' and turn that off and then I adjust my pivot point, and
basically scale those iris faces backwards into the eyeball we're left with this disc shape on the
front of our eyeball and one problem that we'll have, is a very sharp edge between the eyeball and the iris so I select that edge and use my Bevel
Edge tool to soften it, to create more of a rounded
transition between the eyeball and iris area. Next I'm gonna turn my
attention to creating a pupil I grab the vert in the very center and pull it back and also pull some other edge rows
around it backwards, as well, to create more of a smooth divot. And just like I did for the edges of
the iris, I select one of the outer rings of the pupil area and I'll bevel that to can create a nice smooth transition.
I should be left with a shape that looks like this I've got a disc carved out of the eyeball,
that's my iris I've got a pupil in there - so I'm gonna assign a new material to this and I'll use a blinn and I'll set it to a white color - but I
don't want to choose 100 percent white - I want a little pink to it. So that's the material for the sclera (the white part of the eye) now I want to do the iris - an easy way to
select it is to grab that vert in the center, and then use our Grow
Selection, to grow right out to the edges of that
bevel that we created and I will assign a new blinn to it, and I'll just darken it a little, so that we can see, very clearly, the
transition between the sclera and the colored iris inside Now, with the same faces selected, I open up my UV Editor UV Editor. We see that we have just the
regular default sphere UVs I need to Planar Map the iris so: hold SHIFT+RMB and choose Planar Map. Then I'll just move the rest of the UVs for the eyeball out of the way. We need this UV layout for the next step, which is material creation I select the material for the iris, and in the color channel, I plug in a Ramp. And I just need to change that ramp's type to a Circular
Ramp, so I get a nice gradient I set my outer color to be the same
color as the sclera - so, that slightly pink color. Then I adjust the position of the pins so they sit right at the edge of that iris area, so I get a nice
smooth blend Now I want to define the colors of the eye I add a blue pin in here, and that'll be
the base color and I never want to go too saturated with
the colors of the eye - they are natural colors so we're always a bit desaturated and
subdued now, the outermost color is going to be pretty dark, it represents a shadow where
the sclera overlaps the iris of the eye. And next to
that, I add a brighter version of whatever color I've chosen - so brighter
blue and then I add another bright blue
color in the center of the eye - so around the dark part the pupil, we get a much much brighter color, and so
the overall effect is that I have the dark pupil in the center, a bright color right around that, and
then it fades out to the dark ring around the edge of the iris. And I want things shiny:
so I'll lower the eccentricity on my blinn - and I'll turn the Specular Roll Off all the way up and now I'm getting a nice shiny highlight. And this highlight is essential for making the eyeball look alive and interesting. Looking at it,
I want to have a bigger pupil, so I just grab the faces in the center and I turn my Soft Mod on - just hit the 'b' key and I scale it up - and the bigger pupil
just looks a little more proportional okay, now let's add a cornea: the transparent shell around the outside of the eye I start by building the same size sphere with the same number of subdivisions. The difference here, is the
front of my cornea object is going to come out. So I grab the vert that's at the pole of the eyeball there, and
then turn my Soft Modification on, and just pull it a little bit forward and that gives us that little bit of a lens that we need on the front of the eyeball. I'll grab a few
Edge Rings and just scale them down to create a bit more of a lens effect, popping out away from the overall sphere of the eyeball and now I will assign a new Blinn material to it and I'll up the transparency to 100
percent Next, I crank up my Specular Roll Off and
Specular Color to the maximum values and I dial down the Eccentricity a little bit, and this will give me a transparent, shiny sphere that surrounds
the eyeball and now I've got two sets of specular highlights: the one on the iris, and the one on the cornea and this will also help the eyeball feel alive, and it will interact with the lights in the environment much more
nicely. Okay lets add a little bit more color to the sclera (the white part of
the eye) I'm gonna put a ramp on that, and I will ramp from the color that we've already
established for the sclera, to a much more pink/red color at the back
of the eyeball and so this means that as the eyeball
turns and rotates, it'll look just a little bit more bloodshot, and feel like a little bit more like natural tissue without looking very exaggerated or
overdone and at this point, we've got a really
basic eye that we could use but if we want to step it up another
level, we need to add textures. So I open my UV Editor again,
and select the faces of the iris and then I'll go into the Polygons menu, and choose UV Snapshot and I'll choose a relatively high
resolution, and I'll save this image out and I'll use this as a basis for painting in my paint program here, I will use Photoshop, and when we
switch over, we'll see the image that was saved out is basically just a screenshot
of our UVs. Now we can draw on top of that to create our texture first thing I do is create a new layer, filled with grey, and use that as an overlay layer and now I'll start painting. I need to use pressure sensitive brushes in Photoshop, this means that Shape
Dynamics is turned on. We can check that in our brush properties. If we turn it
off, we see that we don't get nice tapered
strokes, and we want that taper on the ends of our brush, it'll make things look a little bit more
natural. So I'll use a black paint brush and I'll start sketching in lines and in general I try to do curved lines so big U-shapes, or big circular shapes I'll vary the sizes, so some will be very
big, some will be very small and I basically do half the eyeball area,
so half is filled up with these black lines and once I'm done filling it up, I'll
duplicate that layer and flip it over, using Edit > Transform >
Rotate 180 then reposition it on the opposite side.
I'll also use the eraser to get rid of this center part of lines, so that they're not
overlapping the pupil. This isn't really strictly necessary. the next step is to create a new layer,
and to use white lines, and I do it in the exact same way that I created the
black lines tiny little ovals, U-shape objects. If you're
using a touch sensitive tablet like the Wacoms You can use two fingers to rotate the
canvas around this way, it makes it a lot easier to paint all the
way around the circumference of the eye just a little tip for those you with touch-sensitive tablets. When the painting is done, we duplicate it the exact same way that we did the black lines now I'll duplicate both of those layers
again, both the white and the black line layers and with those duplicates, I'll go to my
Filter menu >Blur > Gaussian Blur Gaussian Blur, and just do a small blur both layers. So I have a blurred version of both the black and the white lines and then I'll apply them as Overlays over the background, and this just makes
it look a little bit less hand-drawn, a and then when I'm done I'll save it out,
and jump back into Maya 2016. And I want to open up the HyperShade and I'll graph the network of my iris
material - so hold right click on the material and choose Graph Network from the HyperShade. And now it's showing the network of my materials, and I need to add a new texture node, because I'll plug in that Photoshop texture I just added so, on the left there, 2D Texture, and then
just click File and I'm gonna need another node - so I'll
click on Other Textures on the left here, and then
add Layered Texture and this is going to blend together the
color that already created, with the texture I made in Photoshop. And
I need to connect the out color from both the Ramp, and the new 2D Texture, into my Layered Texture - so I can click and drag to connect one and then in its attributes, I can click in the empty box to add another node to the Layered Texture and now I can click and drag the second
texture on to that new node, so that both my textures are
connected to Layered Texture and I can middle mouse drag those
swatches in the Layered Texture, to rearrange them and the one that's closest to the left
is on top, and the one that's closer to the right is on the bottom it works a lot like Photoshop's layering
system now I'll connect this Layered Texture to the diffuse channel, my color channel, for my iris, and we should see our texture pop-up because I've layered the texture on top of my ramp. So I need to adjust the blend mode the same way we adjust blend modes
in Photoshop and I'll click through and check all the
different options so the one I end up using here is Subtract.
That one gives me the look I'm going for now, if we look closely, we'll see the lines
will be drawn overlapping around the outside edges of the iris, and also into the pupil in the center we want to fix that. To do this, I use a
Ramp to control the opacity of the texture in the Layered Texture and the easiest way to do this is to just
grab the Ramp I'm already using and duplicate it by hitting CTRL+d, because
we already know it matches up positions that we need. And I'll just recolor
it I use the existing pins. I just change the outside pins to black and the inside pins to white, and now I'll be
able to use this to fade out that 2D texture as it gets close
to the edges of the iris and towards the pupil in the center I'll jump back to the Layered Texture, and
now we need to plug this new Ramp in. So what I do is go to the Layered Texture, I select the texture - the iris texture that we
created - and middle mouse drag that new Ramp onto that Alpha in the Layered Texture. So: I want to drag it onto the word Alpha. And now we'll see that it's
controlling blending for the opacity of that 2D texture, so that I can adjust where the lines are towards the pupil
and the outside, the iris by just moving the pins on the new black
and white Ramp that I've created. I'll play around with the positions of the pins - you'll see that I pulled that white one towards the centre that'll make texture less opaque at the
edges, but it will blend things together more nicely.
And when we look at it from far away, it works pretty well. So this Ramp and Texture combo won't hold up to super-close scrutiny, but it only took us a few minutes to create.
So this is great for background characters or projects that have a more stylized art
direction style the other great thing about this combo
is it allows me to change the color of the eyes very easily without needing to re-generate new
textures for each color all I have to do is go back into my
original ramp, grab the color nodes and start shifting them into you
other parts of the spectrum so if I want to create green eyes, I just
move it from blue over to green or maybe to yellow and we'll end up with new color combinations. That makes it really easy to create new eyes for each character that we're
making. That's it! That's how we put together
simple eyes in Maya 2016, it's just that easy any questions, don't hesitate to leave a
comment! I'm James Taylor, as always, thanks for watching. :)
