Making an Eye in Zbrush and Rendering

hey I'm Jay and this is making an AI in ZBrush this is what we'll be making here's our eye and the eyeball right now is inside of key shot which is what I chose to render it with but the objects that we're making to be rendered in any rendering engine I'm using key shot because it's really easy with the ZBrush bridge it's pretty straightforward and yeah for all the purposes I need it's perfect but this will work in any kind of renderer mentalray or render man or whatever you have available to you it's fine and I want to first before we jump into the making of it I want to go over the couple key features that are important to keep in mind when making an eye ball because this isn't just limited to a human eyeball I mean this you know this method you could make any eye aliens or monsters or creatures animals whatever you want so the key here is making the two objects the eyeball and the lens on the outside and creating materials for those two that when render to produce a realistic result the and behave the way that our eye is do in the real world so from the side here we can first I can first go over the shape of the lens so with the lens bowing out like this and pay attention this is important that it doesn't it's not a perfect circle here and then has a sharp transition like where there's like 90-degree angles it bows out you know kind of you can picture the center point gradient like pushing like a like a ball coming up through a blanket or something I mean the reason we even have this lens evolutionarily is to be bringing in all the light from all the angles focusing it into our pupil so that we get a full range the opposite of a pinhole camera the lens literally is bringing in as much light as possible and just like a lens we're we're in key shot choose a render this is the glass material and produces what we're seeing right here this is a refraction it's simulating the light coming in through the lens and refracting and bending the light around so we can see the iris now if I turn off the lens we will see how important this is now this is like an eyeball but if I turn off the glass lens that looks horrifying so this is what the eye would be without the lens which is which is crazy so you can actually see not only is it not only is it refracting and bending around so we can see it from the side but also it's changing though it's refracting it from all the angles you can see how the pupil changes and this is what gives the eye its look like it's in this is important the lens being rendered as glass with the refraction index of glass is one of the most important aspects and of the way you make that important is by sip by making those two models the lens is the thing with the bubble and without the lens we have the ball with iris and you get this so with the iris bowing in kind of the opposite of the lens just trying to kind of draw a diagram here so you can see I mean you probably get it that just looks like I'm drawing a an iris pattern but with the light coming in from here what you get is it being shaded from the top and then a highlight right here and then with the lens you'll still see this highlight and then you'll get a reflection on top of it and those those two objects being rendered on top of each other or see you seeing those two objects and those two different material properties on top of each other that's what give eyes their distinct look and it's important to kind of to make eyes in a realistic way even if its stylized you'll notice in Disney and Pixar movies that even though they a instead of a kind of blurry line it might be very crisp instead of a very organic looking iris it might be very straight lines or stylized or just one solid color but it will be it will have an iris that that scoops in just like ours do and it will have a lens that bows out and it'll be rendered like glass or it just it will always be round like you won't ever see an eye that's flat or scooped in like that because that that looks like it hurts you know let's look at some masters here as an example some some of the most famous eyes for me anyway so we'll see here and Davy Jones we have the highlight here right so we have the light coming from this way so that means high light reflects refraction right here and right here because the inside of the iris right here has a reflection and this is shadow because the lights coming from in here so it's hitting this because it's because it's curved in right and then even though there's shadow here because it bolt lit bowls in because of the lens on top now we get a high light and same with the other famous eye good old golem so same deal here we have a high light right here there's actually two light sources which you can see and shadow here and highlight here so shadow highlight on the shadow and then highlight probably little bit easier to see than this one so there we go now we'll jump into ZBrush and start making our eyeball so in our scene we start with a spear primitive we make that a poly mesh to be able to sculpt on it and work with it we save our file for for safety and then in the differ mission I rotated it so that the topology pointed towards me now I'm dragging out an alpha and playing with the strength of it until I get the depth that I want from the middle point I'm just dragging it out the size of the iris like how far I'm going is about half of the radius of that circle you're looking at the eyeball with no perspective then I delete the ring that is the pupil the hole in the middle of the eye and then I extruded it in the display properties and you have to flip it I extruded it with zmodeler so that my pupil hole isn't just straight and it's it has some thickness there so then I go up and I turn on symmetry radial symmetry and I put it to Z so you can see you can play with how many times it duplicates your work here and now that's how I get you get to work radially now and like a lathe and that's what's going to speed up this beginning process here and won't be able to use that pretty often since it's so radial so now a mixture of the damn standard brush the standard the actual standard brush to just create these lines and I'm going off reference that reference link gives in the description if you want to look at the same things I was looking at but I also know generally like I'm you know my goal isn't to make some scientific macro photography I my goal is to have a model of an eye that renders well at a reasonable distance and you know like a one-day project you know I really I really encourage if you're watching and you're interested you should trouble try to follow along and make this you could totally make it in one day and it's a great way to go through the pipeline of ZBrush to key shot and end up with an image so I started out this pattern with the radial symmetry just to like lay something down and then I turn it off and I go in there and and edit it to my liking and you see how I'm making this wrinkly muscle here that goes around maybe not muscle but these wrinkly fibers and then I'm blurring by making soft strokes um the maps there to hopefully create this gradient when I puff it out like now um I masks are a great way to start a big shape like this using inflate or standard or form soft whatever you want you can kind of pop that thing out and then smooth it a bit kind of grading it out you know you think about specs in the eye a little like circles respect you can see in some people's eyes or dark kind of shapes moving in you know when you're when you think about abstract paintings and stuff like that are just ways to make eyes look pretty realistically those are like shadows casted by these by these things so it's kind of interesting we're going to be doing a mixture here of like trying to make these forms that make the light interesting around the iris but also we're going to be painting in lights and dark values it's always a great way to emphasize whatever you like and you know push the push it too I'll have a little bit more person out a little bit more style than we want because you know we're going to make it we're not just going to try to make a boring ish eye we're going to want to make an eye that's somehow a little bit special so now we're going to get into start painting some of this to pop out those forms you can see that we didn't go too far with the forms already but with that like by using cavity masks here and if I'm playing with values to try to just get different effects like what I want is to just come up with layers of value and color here that make it a little bit more complicated you can see there's like I'm playing with saturation and not saturation and now with a bright blue color here I get to pop out that shape I mentioned if you kind of squint I'm always doing that occasionally when I work like just to see what are the what's the blurry value Reed is here I'm darkening up those specks emphasizing them I'm pretty soon I'm going to test out what it looks like in key shot so that we can make some changes here but overall just trying to emphasize these shapes with value and form here I'm experimenting too all the time you know I don't I don't know exactly what I'm gonna like yet here I'm darkening in and I'm gonna keep changing the iris too because so many irises are different and I didn't want to make one that was like really like exceptional you know because I'd like to be a little bit generic and I'll just keep this in my file in my files and use them in projects so um the way I got the lens is I sectioned I masked off the bit that's been chopped off to make the initial pupil with the transparency where it is and then I blur that mask a lot so that that gradient helps me pull that little bubble out now because we extruded it we can't use the UVs of the primitive so I went up to the plug in the UV master and I just unwrapped it without symmetry and now we have you v's so then I went to texture new from poly paint cloned it export it as a tiff now I'm importing that TIFF into key shop now I'm seeing how does this look with the lens on the outside it's glass and with what we've painted on the inside and now with the connection made you know I'm gonna try to go back and forth here and see you know see what I can see in ZBrush what I want to improve you can see the shadows now casted by those forms I was talking about especially on the bottom you can really see the difference here it gets so dark in key shot and that's because it's actually casting a shadow there every now and again you have to reapply in the end I think I end up thinking that it's too much contrast that kind of squiggly fibers around the middle just pops out too much and I want I don't want it to distract from anything I want it to look just like an eye I don't want to draw attention to the eye you know like someone with striking blue eyes or something you know if you making a character a creature where the eyes are specialness should pop out there should be one of the important features like one of the exceptional features then you just edit it you know you could take this eye in any direction that you want this kind of model you could make it an alien or an animal too you could even turn this into a cat eye without that much effort so now in Photoshop because I made this TIFF right now you have the full power Photoshop I just made a mask around the iris area and now we can make it Brown you make any color you want but as an example I made it brown so that we can have a brown eye and a blue eye and I can kind of demonstrate that you know once you once you get once you paint that poly paint with Photoshop now you can do whatever you want and because we painted a poly paint we don't worry about the seams and stuff if we're doing all this procedural editing and if we want to do a special kind of edit we can go back to the poly paint paint on it rip out a new texture from ZBrush and there you go so again checking my progress so now we're going to start painting the veins and just the red around the back of the eye and I didn't go too crazy with this either that obviously varies I mean we know with ourselves that varies day to day you know if you want to make a guy look like drunk or hasn't slept in a long time but the general thing is is the same it's just more or less red more more or less veins I blushed in the red in the back put that radial again saves time just blotching a bunch of red and now with the I turned on the lazy Mouse stroke so that I can I can make nice clean veins and squiggly veins again you know look at reference for this stuff so that you can kind of discern patterns and where things go but it's a it's quite a lot of veins more than I even paid in here I didn't go crazy oh and I even used to fill in the edges around I use Z brushes vein alpha that comes with it and I put it on a scatter brush and just like lightly scattered it around to fill in the gaps now checking in our veins and now I'm blurring that edge I want to make sure that that looks blurry and popping out that fiber thing that we were working on it got a lot more you sculpt a more it kind of gets lost but it's it's important to me that the iris is a little bit blurry around the edge like it's a fine line because you're getting that corner from so many things the form stopping of the iris the color and the lens stopping so all of these things are like in a trifecta making this edge so the goal for me is to make the iris close-up not crisp organic looking but from a distance definitely a hard circle which as you can see we're getting you see how hard that circle looks here the edge of our iris and how blurry it actually is so I'm still just blurring it out and moving back and forth to see how our progress is but that light coming in around I like that there you have it making an eye in ZBrush I hope you learned a thing or two I really hope that if you're interested all in doing this do it if you're interested in the pipeline from ZBrush to keyShot totally do this is a great project that takes a few hours you could give yourself a whole day and take something from scratch all the way key shot make a nice pretty image and you know make it an alien eye a monster eye whatever it's got so many different little techniques that'll really add to your toolbox for other projects you have in mind so yeah I hope you enjoyed the video drop a like if you want subscribe if you like this sort of thing you want to see more videos and happy sculpting peace eyes the windows to the soul

Channel: J Hill

Views: 279,654

Rating: 4.8921041 out of 5

Keywords: zbrush, eye, tutorial, how to, keyshot, rendering, sculpting, zbrush eye, realistic eye, eye tutorial, jay hill, zbrush tutorial, speedsculpt, speed sculpt

Id: Qj5uK6RSdUo

Length: 16min 58sec (1018 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 09 2016