Creating more depth in a scene

Hi all, Thank you for reading this

Background: I currently have a scene of a character (monkey) that looks at 4 separate objects on a platform. It does this using eye movement only, or eye and head movement. These movements are rendered as animations but I have only provided one rendered frame here of the eye & head movement.

enter image description here

Critique needed/Issue: The rendered results/scene at the moment does not have much depth, and therefore it is difficult to make out what the monkey is looking at. I’m looking at any criticism and suggestions to improve this aspect of the scene and/or character.

Current steps taken to resolve this issue (Any suggestions as to how to best achieve the goals below is appreciated)

I’m currently working on constructing another eye ball with better corneal reflection (with BSDF shaders etc) that will provide some depth cues. Working on changing the lighting of the scene to improve depth. Changing the focal length of the camera

Any suggestions is very much appreciated,

best, B

One thing you might consider is how lighting might help you. How does it look if the item being looked at is lit for slightly more emphasis.

Hi Ontogenic. Thank you for your suggestions. Perhaps it’s good for me to step back to explain my objective.

I work at a behavioural lab that will use these videos to train monkeys to follow the gaze (direction of looking) of the avatar monkey. For this reason we’d like to keep the targets as evenly lit as possible to not have any pop-out effect. Any other suggestions would be appreciated.

Thank you!
B