I followed the Wikibook tutorial for creating Pixar looking eyes here:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro/Creating_Pixar-looking_eyes_in_Blender
Everything goes ok but why does the jpg-image on the iris-part of the eye dissapear when I join all parts of the eyeball (control - J)?
I would like to have the whole eyeball as one object.
I followed instructions there and the settings look right and I have texture space on and the image on the iris is there and looks good when I render but after I join the iris-part to the eyeball, the image is gone. 
Then you probably have this problem:
https://blenderartists.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=52514&highlight=iris+shadow
%<
Here are the eyes. The other one has the iris connected to the eyeball and the other doesn’t. The cornea is transparent and is not casting a shadow on the iris. Both eyes are identical, the only difference being the right one is joined by control - J.
I put LSCM UV mapping in the iris and then joined all the parts and it came out like this. The Pixar Eye tutorial says nothing about UV mapping.
Now it looks like maybe the white part of the eye has lost something…? :o
That’s a shadow. If you turn off Shadows for that material (white.001) it goes away.
%<
No, I think it’s because I have to have TexFace on for the UV-mapped iris to render and when this TexFace is on, the material white.001 looses it’s RGB color (it’s almost white but has little color) and becomes 100% white. So when I click TexFace for the UV-mapped part of the eye, I can’t get color on the rest of the eye because the RGB-sliders don’t show when TexFace is on. ???
Okay, but when it don’t work, remember what I said.
%<
The iris doesn’t look the same at all if you compare the eyes on the left. The second one has UV-mapping but both share the same image texture. Any thoughts about that?
Is it better to parent all the parts of the eye to the eyeball instead of joining them all?
I UV-mapped the image to the iris and parented the cornea and iris to the rest of the eyeball and I’m leaving it like that.
You can only UV-map one image to a mesh, is that right?
Yes but… you can map the same image to many different parts of the mesh. You can also combine 2 or more images into one in a paint program, either next to one another, in layers or parts of one image clone tooled onto another.
%<
Ok. Thank You Fligh % Forum Monkey! 