Creating a Procedural Eyeball with Blender 2.8 

Blender has the most amazing community on Earth. Seriously. It seems no matter what I want to do with it, somebody has taken the time to put together a high-quality tutorial on that exact subject. I had absolutely no idea how to shade a freaking eyeball realistically. My specialty is hard surface modeling and in my 6th year of doing that very heavily, I still feel like a novice. A few short seconds of searching on RU-vid and voila, here I am - an entire tutorial on how to do an eyeball. The most obscure subjects are covered in detail. By people who know what they're doing. I hope people appreciate this video and the countless others like it. They can be life-altering if a life-altering project is in the works.

At 15:28 he changed the roughness of the sclera texture to 0.05. If your pupil looks blurry/pixelated and won't change size, make sure you do this as he didn't mention it in the video. It fixed the issue for me when I did it.

a way i used to almost get entirely rid of the shading problem was creating a sphere with half of the subdivisions, then proceed with the grid fill and snapping, then create a subd level of 1 followed by a cast modifier set to sphere with a value of 1. apply those in sequence and now you have a perfect sphere with almost zero shading problems

It's amazing how you did all of that exclusively with procedural materials. No textures involved - impressive!

Great tutorial, I have spent another two hours refining the nodes. The eyes came out near life-like realistic, due to the tips you have given. These techniques can apply to many other projects. Now I don't have to slap the devil out of my paintbrush anymore!

Can I just say that since making mistakes, especially in Blender, is pretty much a given for me, I find it incredibly helpful to watch you navigate your way from "unexpected result" to "expected result". I learn as much from why that didn't work to why it now does. I like the way you explain things. I have learned a lot from you.

the best thing is that you recorded messing up ... and I'm seriously meaning it ... gives beginners hope, that we are not idiots, it's just a complex software making it easy to miss something ...

Awesome. Also, thank you for including the flubs in your video. I think many times that's more instructive than the "how-to" part of tutorials, because invariably I click on something else and spend 14 hours trying to find my way back. I think most folks would agree that when learning, breaking something and learning how to fix it is more useful than just learning how to make it. Thank you!

Just dropping another comment here to say that I absolutely love your tutorials Kent, I'm getting such amazing results every time and it's such a pleasure to listen to you! 😊😊

The Blender community, in my experience, has been very generous with information and I honestly have learnt so much in a short period of time… I am enjoying every moment of this experience thanks to the likes of you 🧡 stay Golden

Wow this is true blender magic

19:25 it works because it scales texture cordinate pattern. On the same setup create the cube with the same orgin. Apply this material to the cube. Change shader to volume scatter and pull it to volume. Delete surface shader. Play with mapping scale and you will see.

This was awesome! I'm making an eye for a creature and this was the coolest thing - seeing a complex shape like that come to life with these steps. The pacing was amazing as well! Thank you thank you thank you!

This is a first rate tutorial, very well done! It all worked out for me and love the new eyes!

Thank you very much for this tutorial, special thanks to the CG author, for the realistic model. Excellent explanation and knowledge of the blender program. An excellent specialist. I wish you development and success!

Excited to watch this! Edit: amazing work.. loved it

@CG Cookie. I'd like to see a video of this re-done in the latest version, 3.1.2. Because I am having a hell of a time trying it.

Great practice of the shader editor. Had a few issues but managed to solve them fairly well. awesome video! ^^

I had a blast following this tutorial. Thank you!!

Dude, whats there to say? You guys in the Blender community are extremely lucky. Top notch tutorial, man.

I love you. I've been looking all over for a tutorial like this. Very direct and concise even with that little mishap. ;)

Great tutorial. I had a lot of lag when I connected the bump node. I recommend to anyone experiencing the same thing to reduce the detail level in the noise texture connected through the bump node.

this is really awesome. need to give it a go

Amazing tutorial! Thank you very much for sharing this information.

👏amazing video. your shader was super simple and effective, much better than others i've watched.

Now add an input value node to control the pupil diameter. Perhaps even tie that to the light level of your scene. Oh, and add saccadic movement :)

Thank you for great tutorial. Amazing result!

What an amazing tutorial and you are such a great tutor... thank you!

This is awesome! Thanks for this tutorial!

👍👍👍 - have watched several amazing videos today, but this one definitely tops the list.

Dude you're awesome. Your tutorials are such fun to watch😄😄

Ah! Thank you so much for this upload. I was waiting for this.

This was immensely helpful. Thank you.

Kent, as usual, AMAZING!

Most complicated tutorial I have ever watched 11 times. Results are unrivalled. Thanks. (My render came out without pupil though, even though its seen in viewport)

very good but u should mention that u cant actually use that eye with vertex groups and armature in usual way bcs of object texcord node. so to pose this eye u need a dumped track constrain thing and type your armature and eye bone in it.

Thank you so much, I've done mine and it's looking amazing

I seem to be getting too much refraction from the cornea. I noticed my IOR is the same as in this tutorial and my dimensions were very similar. I tried reducing the depth of the iris, but it didn't seem to help. Any ideas?

Sick! Cant wiat on weekend

I've followed Your tutorial and slightly modified it by adding second layer of fibers on iris. It looks awesome :) Thanx for this video :) it is very helpfull :)

Great explained 💗💗

Unbelievably Awesome eye and work 🤍🔥. Thankyou very much...

This tutorial is really good, best eye I have made so far, need to learn how to do it now without a tutorial handy. I do have a question for anyone really how would I get this into a game engine?

First I'd like to say that this tutorial is phenomenal. It is definitely one of the best that I have seen through all of my rabbit holes regarding Blender. How would I go about baking these textures for use in a game engine? I am having trouble with the transmission just baking black and none of the "veins" through the voronoi texture baking. Any help is appreciated!

Absolutely useful. This is great. Thanks

What a great tutorial, thanks a bunch

my brain melted at the exact 20:00 minute mark when you mixed a texture with a coordinate and used it as a mapping coordinate

Graet video. Nice haircut brother - lookin sharp.

Really nice ! will try theese eyes on my new character.. ive noticed tho that I cant put on a mirror modifier, since when i apply the location it gets messed up.

That was a very great tutorial. It works in Eevee and with little amendment also in Cycles.

Hover over a colour input field in blender and press E to go straight to the eyedropper. And select two nodes and Ctrl+NumPad 0 to join with a mixRGB.

A Legendary tut

Thank you so much for your tutorial - I have learnt so much :)

I am not really understand the node part but it looks amazing how the result turn out to be

This is a great tutorial.

This is magic! Thank you!

Thank you so much for sharing this

Thats sooooooo GOOOOD Niceee

Lol.. I like that you put your mistakes in the tutorial.. I have spent hours trying to figure out what I did wrong when it was something as simple as forgetting to click assign.. (14:24).. Lucky for me, I Made that mistake a few days ago and didn't forget.. This helped me make a really great looking eye.. Thank you!!! Way easier then having to take out my Childs eye and photogrammy the whole thing..

u are really good master!

the normal map trick saved me a lot thanks you.

Great tutorial, I learned a lot, thanks :)

19:20 I believe that it works like that because 1# it's a sphere, 2# the y-axis goes through the two tips of the sphere, 3# Increasing the size in the y-axis moves the voronoi cells towards the tip of the sphere where the texture will be less affected by the y-scaling since more surface area is located at a smaller interval on the y-axis over there (of course the scaling in the y-axis at the very tip will be 0 due to its tangent) This means that the texture towards the tip needs to get more condensed to keep up with the y-axis scaling in the middle of the sphere where you see the most warping. I believe this is the case. I figured this out when I tried to replicate it on a flat surface, I really badly need that effect right now, so that sucks...

When I see something so procedural (and animatable), related to characters... it's hard for me to not file it under "rigging". Thanks!

Loved this tutorial, thank you ! Keen to know if you have a tutorial on Skin shader similar to the character in this vid, paid or otherwise ? Cheers

this guy and his nodes he could over complicate a wet dream!!

Any chance you could post the .blend file? I’ve walked through this a few times, but I’m continually have issues with the iris and pupil materials, specifically with the gradient map and the size as it relates to the pins on the node. I either seem to get too large of a pupil or WAY too large of a pupil. Even no pupil at all. I’d like to compare meshes to see if that’s where I went wrong or if it’s something else. Thanks!

Love ur work 💞💖

Great, learned more than i intended to.

Thank you. I am a beginner and learned a lot.!

AMAZING!

Wow, great, thanks!!!!

Thanks for the great video - I learned a lot. Could you possibly post a screenshot of your nodes so we can see all the final values?

Hey CG cookie, Curious. Do you have a tutorial for doing the other body parts? Like maybe the skin? Great video BTW. I learned alot ^_^

Really cool tutorial! I have a strange issue though, at the end, my iris is so dark when behind the sclera, even tho I have transmission set to 1. hmmm!

What will be the process if you need to bake all the textures for both geometries? Thanks for sharing this amazing knowledge.

7:04 circle option of Loop tool provides some better result. after all these snapping.

on my iris texture nodes, the color ramp that decides the base color (the one with the 4 color flags on it). My black flag is on the left and blue is on the right, and even if i keep adding more flags it doesnt change the look of it.

on the refraction mess up u just had to give the screen space refraction some value like 0.01 or something small. but unchecking the refraction just takes away the refraction. I think. u helped me a lot btw.

Thanks!! it worked more or less on Blender 4.1 I had to change a couple things, thank You!

thank you for the video!

very nice, thank you

Great material lesson! How avoid to break the mapping after scaling down the eye and apply the scale?

How do you fix that iris reflection issue, I assigned enabled, re-abled the reflection/refraction tabs both on the material and Evee options and now I’m banging my head against the keyboards, in short; how?

Really great tutorial! My only question is how to mirror the eye on the characters face so its accurate!

If anyone wants to perfect the sphere after grid fill select the outer edge of the selected grid fill, and push back ever so slightly the round edge and you should see those corners disappear.

Thank you for the tutorial. Can i ask you ? Why the rig deformed a procedural texture eye? How fix it?

i'm kinda late but i noticed that the shading artefact what are you talking about is cause by the subdivision modifier and can you can make it disappear by setting it to 1 (Ctrl + 1)

Thank you for the great tutorial! Can these eyes be used for animated characters? I created my first characters' eyes using your tutorial, but now that I am trying to rig and animate them, the procedural texture shifts around the eyeball when attempting to parent it to the rig? I tried to bake the texture, but the baking does not seem to be possible for the transparency on the cornea etc.

How about using looptools->circle to make the iris faces more round after snapping?

Yes

Lol, that troubleshooting part is just so damn real. And we have the same faces when it doesn't work out 14:14

This tutorial was great and so easy! Thank you very much! I am just trying to figure out why I can't see the iris in the rendered image, someone can help?

great tutorial! at 23.05, how do I see what it looks like in the final material ? what are the hotkeys ?

Wow!

In my case, I had to enable the screen refraction in materials tab, why is it so, care to explain?

What options did he change at exactly the 14:00 cut that made the reflections on the eye crystal clear?

very cool

15:41 I had the problem that the black part wouldn't shrink, it was fixed when I set the y-location in mapping for the iris material back to 0. In case someone has the same problem

The Veins.. Mind Blown! " What a goober