Eyeballs: Texture or Mesh?

Support Materials and Textures
1

I wasn’t sure where to put this topic, either in M&T or Modeling.

Okay, as the username suggests, I’m a Kirby fanatic. To practice modeling, I like making Kirby characters, which are simple to model yet test my rigging abilities better than regular humanoids. I ran into a problem, though: the eyes. See this picture here:

http://www.smashbros.com/en_us/characters/images/kirby/kirby.jpg

Obviously, those eyes are not meshes themselves… right? How are those kinds of eyes made? Are they part of the texture, or something else? Bit confused here. Can anyone help me out on making eyes like these?

2

They look like part of the texture. Small image though. You appear to have a sphere and four other parts, so a simple mesh. You will need to unwrap it and position the texture correctly for the front face. If its made this way then you will have difficulties animating the eyes but it will be simple to make.

You should make this in a way that you need as the best way would depend on what you intend to use it for.