HOW Do I make realistic Human eyes In Zbrush?
Charlie Pope, San Francisco
As an artist, I know how important it is to have a library full of assets ready to be used in any project I get to work on. It helps a lot when the schedule is tight and with a deadline approaching, all you want to do is focus that precious time and energy on more bespoke parts of the project. Whenever I find myself between client projects, I like to update and expand my library of assets, and this time I am focusing on sculpting a realistic human eye.
No two eyes are exactly the same, so unless you have something very specific in mind, it does not matter how perfectly you copy the reference material. As long as you understand the anatomy and get the general shape right to allow the light to do its job, you can create just about anything.
Let’s simplify our organ of sight into four areas: cornea, iris, pupil and sclera. A real human eye contains a lot more than this, but we are going to focus on the four visible areas because that is all we need to make it believable. Nonetheless, it is worth knowing how the real thing is built and how all the little components work together in order to enable us to see.
The cornea is the dome-shaped clear front surface of the eye, which works like a camera lens to focus light. The iris is the pigmented circular structure that controls how much light enters the eye by automatically adjusting the size of the pupil with two muscles: the sphincter pupillae to narrow the pupil, and the dilator pupillae to widen it. We will build the iris as one object with pupil and sclera, the white part of the eye. The pupil (which is like a camera aperture) is the black hole in the iris, and contracts when it’s exposed to bright light, and expands in the dark,
allowing more light into the eye to help you see.
To start off, we will create two spheres. Let’s name the first one Sclera, and its duplicate Cornea. Scale up the Cornea a tiny bit so it wraps around the Sclera. Make sure that the Cornea sphere is not so big it casts shadows on the Sclera, but big enough not to intersect. With the base prepared, you are ready to sculpt. Before you jump into Zbrush, look at reference images of human eyes; you will see how different they all are. Decide which pattern you like most and follow the steps.