For school I have to make a film noir. Its about a girl in the bush, lost.
For a flashback the camera goes into the eye.
When I filmed it, it was overcast and looked like this:
Here is the eye I made:
As you can see, the lighting is all wrong. What would be the best method to make realistic lighting for this scene?
Also, what else could I do to the eye to make it look more realistic?
first have a look here. though it’s for maya, some interesting tips (and maps) are there. use an UV-sphere instead of nurbs and use proportional modelling to create the shape shown. (in edit mode, press “o” to toggle prop. modelling)
http://www.andrew-whitehurst.net/eyeTut.html
for the lighting try multiple lamps, beware of using AO. if you do, you won’t be able to produce the shot in one pass - due to the fact that the eye-lens mesh and the actual eye-mesh are so closed together, the eyeball will become extremely dark. so you may render one pass with the face and AO, and one with the eye, without AO.
here a quickie i made (without AO).
to gain more realism make more eyelashes and add eyebrows. also the geometry around the eye seems wrong and somehow zombiish. last but not least a slightly painted human skin texture will help (slight variations of the skin color, spots etc.)
Thanks for the help. I tried some of the things you mentioned:
I already used a UV-Sphere and proportional modelling.
I made a few more faces on the left of the eye, and more lamps (4 total).
But my 2 main problems I’m concerned about at the moment is:
It still doesn’t look like real sun. What sort of lamps, and how many should I use?
If you look at the reflection in the eye. It reflects everything except in the pupil. This is weird because, I have the eye with no reflections. All textures. Then I have another UV sphere over the top of that one, but slightly bigger. This does have reflections. Yet for some strange reason it refuses to show any over the iris. 
Anyone know why?
Does anyone know the answer to that question?
I really need to know about the sunlight too.
Because for this project I also need some slow camera panning shots of the bush. Although they will be out of focus the lighting needs to be just right or everyone will laugh at how CG it looks.
Does anyone know of a good method to get great (overcast?) sunlight?
Thanks. 8)
If it’s overcast and you can’t see directional shadows from the trees, then you’re in almost a 100% global illumination situation. Use the fake-GI hemisphere tricks with appropriately parented and dupliverted spotlights. Turn of shadowing on the cornea.
Whether or not the colors show up in black depends on whether you set the texture map to mix/add/subtract/multiply/divide. All will have different effects on the color, but mainly you can’t add to black, I think. Black plus anything is still black. A mirrored surface creates an overlay image that will show reflections for any color.
Try to change the color settings around, it’s a pop up menu in the third tab of the Material settings, on the far right.
your eye still looks quite flat. if you use two meshes, one for the “inner” surface (white eyeball, iris & pupil pulled back a little - as described in the tutorial) and one for the outer, glossy surface, including the bulged lens thing would wokr out much better. this way you could also turn on reflections for the outer material only, and i believe that would look much better than now.
sorry to say that, but the part of the face that is visible still doesn’t look like a part of the face. as the human eye/brain is extremely sensitive to even small details, the image automatically looks “unrealistic”, regardless of the lighting.
so i’d concentrate on the geometry first, and then try to find the best lighting solution.
do you have a camera? if yes, make a close-up shot of your face, preferably using daylight. or in a room with very good (bright) light.
then zoom into the area of interest and watch, watch, watch. try to find out where the shadowed/bright areas are, what the eye is actually reflecting (you can exaggerate that later, of course) and so on. a good reference will help you a lot to find the “weak” areas.
Thanks for the help everyone.
I’ve tried some of the things you have mentioned.
But unfortunately to no luck.
Shbaz, I tried changing add/subract etc. of the iris (the green part) however, it didn’t seem to do anything. Do I change that for the iris?
Because thats the only part of the eye that actually has textures. The rest are just materials.
Harkyman, thanks for the help. I’ll give that a try as soon as I get this reflection sorted.
Solmax, I am using 2 meshes, one is gloss one is the eye ball. The reason it looks flat, is because the iris refuses to show the reflections.
Anyone know how to make it show?
Thanks
do you use raytracing for the reflections? if yes, then probably your raydepth settings are too low - put them up to 3 or 4.
Isn’t Raydepth how far it reflect objects? Well, I tried it. Unfortunately it didn’t work.
If anyone has a chance, could you please take a look at it for me? Thanks
Here is the file:
RAR - http://redbyte.creativeblend.net/other/eyemodel.rar 63kb
ZIP - http://redbyte.creativeblend.net/other/eyemodel2.zip 104kb
Thanks 
you have to enable Raymir for EVERY material you want to reflect. the iris-material had it disabled.
the best eye ball tutorial I found
http://www.3dtotal.com/team/tutorials/antro_eye1/antro_eyemod_01.asp
http://www.3dtotal.com/team/tutorials/antro_eye2/antro_eyetex_01.asp
antropus is a master, look after his site.
http://www.antropus.com/
When you enabled RayMir on the iris did it work?
I tried it. But no luck.
Remember there are 2 spheres. Nothing in the eye is supposed to reflect, except the outer sphere. Which is basically the gloss on the eye.
Anyone know why its not reflecting the iris?
Thanks