Realistic Eyes

Hello, I’m doing a project for my High School and need some assistance with both the modeling and rendering. I need to create realistic eyes (Which I have never attempted) and animate them using drivers. The problem that I most need help on though, is Blender’s internal renderer and the nodes system. I have looked at various tutorials before and still can only get mediocre results. I’ve used other renderers before but have gotten the same basic outcomes. Please help, thanks.
(Here’s what I have so far)

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Look up the eye tutorial on BlenderCookie.com. It’s really good.

http://www.blendercookie.com/2010/02/08/creating-an-eyeball/

I learned from it to make the colored part of the eye on this current project.

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=195456
look at post 10

thanks, but do you know how to work with the nodes editor? I’m fairly new with it.

Not a bad start.
They look like glass though… Also you have to have more contrast when presenting something, what i mean is that the eyes kinda blend in with the background, so but a different background there, for contrast. So in simple terms, you have a black cube, dont put it on a dark background, and vise versa.

Here is a tutorial on the actual eye mesh(s): http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro/Creating_Pixar-looking_eyes_in_Blender

As for the blender compositor (nodes) most of the knowledge comes from experimentation. Cuz really that is what you do anyway, you never really know the right settings for stuff, but the best place to look i think is at Andrew Price’s tutorials, he almost always uses the compositor in his tutorials, but here is the Introduction to the Compositor tutorial he made: http://vimeo.com/11565667

This is irrelevant to your current project but i made 2 compositor tutorials (glow effects) that you can check out: http://vimeo.com/13322805 and http://vimeo.com/13508778

Now about the rigging…what do you mean by drivers? Do you know what they even are? I mean how complex can the eye animation can be??? All you have is rotation…traking basically. So what you do is parent them to the Head Bone in your character rig, then add 1 or 2 bones in front of the eyes(move them some distance from the eyes though) and add a “Track To” Constrain to the eyes, with the bone(s) as targets. SO wherever you move the target bones, the eyes will look at them! And that is all!

Oh and i dont think you need an external render engine for a pair of eyes…

Good luck mate!

I haven’t actually watched the whole tutorial. But i’m pretty sure nodes aren’t required for the eyeballs in the blendercookie tutorial. If you want to do some post production with nodes, then definitely go to blenderguru.com. Andrew Price uses them in nearly every scene.