I am finally happy with Togo's eyes. After a lot of research and some trial and error I think I've arrived with a result that looks good. I had this moment when I thought, "If I do any more tweaking I'll lose his character." I ended up re-modeling the eye completely. Cornea, iris, pupils, whites...all over again to really get the correct shape. Then I also modeled tear ducts, which I completely over looked. It made a huge improvement.
I'll never forget to do that again!
But after this, the character really came to life. It ended up being more of a modeling issue then a texture issue. I kept changing the textures but realized after a while that I was not getting the right highlights in the right areas.
The whites of the eye ended up as a SSS material. The iris was a little tricky. For that I used a falloff map (with texture bitmaps) and found that if I added a slight self illumination gradually increasing is it gets further away from the camera...it made for a good effect. It makes Togo look real.
I also created a rig for the eyes so I could move them around and make the pupils dilate as well. I find that this helps because a character never keeps their eyes stationary anyway. You can see the light play on different surfaces of the eye.
So for now, I'm happy with it. I'm going back for one more "grit" pass on the his body texture map. He's still a little too clean and not aged enough. After this I have a couple props to make for him. Hopefully I'll be animating and rendering him for the new demo reel next week.
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