Wow! Your content is an absolute goldmine, and the fact that it's free is absolutely incredible. I just wanted to let you know how grateful I am for your content. Thank you so much!
One thing I noticed is that the pupil scale is just one scalar that controls the radius, yielding only round pupils. I would love to see your take on how to make different pupil shapes like cat/goat eyes. The custom node can be tinkered with and I managed to isolate x and y directions independently, but it produces 8 shaped pupils instead of an oval or a sharper almond shape you would need for a contracted cat's eye.
I am actually working on something like this right now. I am going to try to apply a set of textures made in Substance Designer to the metahuman eye’s geometry and see how that looks. I don’t think it’s possible to rely on the way this shader works to really control the iris contracting and relaxing, but it might work out well enough as is with a different texture set, provided that it just stays in its neutral state. However in order to make fully contracting eyes for the 3 different types of pupils (or more if you look at animals like squids or crabs), I think that fully custom shaders designed to work with the geometry of each case might be more adequate and precise. There is only so much you can do if your geometry is off.
Good look at the eye shaders! Thanks. Though shouldn't the highlight on the iris should be on the opposite side of the cornea specular in the Unity shader? I know you didn't make these, but I feel like that would be a relatively easy fix that would bring a big improvement to the look and feel of the eye.
Beautiful content Ben, much appreciated! Clear and palpable explanations. Just one question, I'm trying to femiliarize myself with Unity and my work revolves around realistic character look dev for digital human. Wondering if the same you've shown here with the HDRP pipeline can be done with the URP? This is how we have everything set up for now in Unity and wondering if we're hitting a brick wall here while trying to push realism using only URP? I just realized that the list of SSS diffusion profiles available in the HDRP global settings from the project settings are nowhere to be found if your project is set up with URP instead. I do have this MG_SSS_profile available in the shader graph, just not sure how well it fares compared to what I would get with HDRP SSS shaders? Your input on this would be very much appreciated, thanks! Love your videos, they are great!
The goals of HDRP and URP are different. HDRP attempts to render graphics that are as realistic as possible - so it has a lot of high-end features that can also end up being quite expensive for performance. (taking longer to render on the GPU, using more texture memory, etc) For that reason, HDRP is only recommended for use on high-end PCs and the newest generation of consoles. (HDRP should not be used on mobile, older PCs, etc.) URP, on the other hand, has the goal to be as broadly compatible as possible. This means that is intended to be used on everything from a low-end Android phone all the way up to a high-end PC. Because broad platform support is the goal, URP doesn't support some features that are high-end only. Diffusion profiles and eye-specific lighting models are examples of this. Sometimes, you can imitate the look of the missing higher-end features by building more complex graphs in Shader Graph. If you're required to use URP for compatibility reasons, that's what I would do. Identify the features of the eye you want to achieve and then figure out how to do it using nodes in the graph. On the other hand - if your goal is to create the most realistic-looking characters possible, and you know that your project will not need to run on lower-end devices, you might consider switching to HDRP instead. The route you take depends on the goals of your end product.
@@BenCloward wow, thanks Ben! That was very useful. I'll see what happens. I really want to make the case for us to use HDRP in the pipeline because it seems you can get such nice result in regards to realism and I'm just generally excited about realistic skin shaders and proper refraction shaders etc. I see that on the roadmaps they do have these scene converters planned for the future, so I'm thinking why not have both and then based on the devices used, a URP od HDRP can be chosen or loaded. Again, thanks for the advice, I'll have this in mind!
Hello, does anyone know how to insert a custom iris texture? Or has a copy of the old eye shader (which has an iris col texture slot in the MI) Help appreciated!
Ah, you’re talking about the light reflecting off of the retina in the back of the eye, right? That would be a cool effect to add. It could probably be done with a method similar to what I did with the reflective road sign tutorial. The problem with it, though is that you’d need to have the light lined up just right to see it, so it wouldn’t be seen very often. Not sure if it would be worth the extra cost to compute.
I was surprised the example Unity project had a complete sphere. Can you delete the back of the eye for optimization? And the shader network seems really complex, could you use it as is?
Nice to hear from you, Michael! Yes, and yes. As I mentioned in the video, since eyes are usually pretty small on the screen, it's ok to use a more expensive shader on them, since the shader isn't being used on very many pixels overall. And if you find that the shader has features you're not using, you can duplicate it and then remove them in your version.
Can I apply this shaders (if I create my own sclera and iris texture) to my eye model and sell it with character as an asset on 3d stocks like cgtrader and unreal marketplace? What about copyrights if I use their eye base mesh and shader?
These are free samples that ship with Unity and Unreal. I don't think people are going to want to buy something from you that they can download for free from the game engine companies. Since I don't own them, I can't give permission for you to use them that way. You'd need to contact an official rep from Unity and/or Epic.
The projects I'm showing here are already available for download from Epic (the MetaHuman project) and from Unity (the HDRP Material Samples). Let me know if you need help finding them.
