I brought myself on a dangerous ground trying to properly represent modern anime chars in 3D CGI, however now i think i found a comfortable edge of the “uncanny valley” (let me know if model is creepy to you ^^) and i’m going ahead with it…
This would be Akane Tendo from Ranma 1/2 (dressed as in “Love Panic” OVA intro. Consult youtube for further details)
I know this render sucks (sorry for that), but i disabled postprocessing, SSS and amb. occlusion due to time constraints.
Point is: this is going to be a brief animation (4/5 seconds. will stick to internal renderer because i LOVE material nodes capabilities).
Char is not due to move (camera is) but the idea is to simulate typical anime “pre-cry trembling eyeshine” (hope you can figure/recall it) while camera moves sideways.
A satisfying resuld could be a “simmering” shining stain on the cornea.
I’m getting closer to it with carefully crafted raytraced transparencies, but edges aren’t sharp enough and further increasing hardness is almost useless (i don’t like workarounds such as moving env. maps or reflex-like textures. will use them just as last resort).
The only working approach so far is to add 5/6 specific lights in front of each eye, but that way render time grows exponentially, and i’m not willing to invest dozens (maybe hundreds) of hours of rendering for such a simple scene.
I’m thinking about blinn + an armature to slightly deform cornea surface over time, but i’m not sure it’s worth the hassle.
Ergh,her eyes looks too glassy. Zombie John can help you, NYAH! http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=128144
His eye setup is really good! You should learn a bit from it! The rest of your model is pretty solid,though.
TY pal (Never spotted that thread. Must’ve been blind at the time).
My target result is far less cartoonish (his one is AWESOME but not what i aim to), but the double-normal-map-trick for lightspots is cool.
Now I’m trying to engineer such a normals pattern without using a static bitmap as he did (probably i’ll fail and will settle for a static myself, however i must try: i’m kinda purist and dislike structural bitmap textures).
Hope his ideas and my dumb eye shape (structure is similar) can work together.
I basically appiled a simplified version of his tecnique with a couple of twists: this is kinda doll model, not a cartoon, so i sticked to cooktorr (tried others but this one proven more reliable under lighting variations).
Given this eye size, and in order to preserve proportions, the two corneas are not even vaguely isoplanars: reflections were ALWAYS completely different between eyes.
To fix it I had to blend between actual surface normals and camera vector (see image) depending upon the dot product between them (basically, cornea normals are parallel when you render model from before, but they revert to actual surface normals when you do the same from the side).
This way, on both eyes, you see similar reflections when Akane is staring at you, differnent ones when she’s angled.
As expected, when i managed to procedurally generate the normal map i just realized i was uv-mapping a 3d procedural texture, so i settled for a bitmap one :-).
Now it’s time to fix eyes cheesy-ness, slightly increase details on model, find a decent material for clothing/hat/ribbon, remove a couple of collisions, <more stuff>, <you add here>
