Creating an Eyeball

by David Ward

In this tutorial, I show you how to create a fairly realistic-looking eyeball. The iris is made using a technique (using a circle with fractal subdivisions) I learned from a user named “Handlebar” over on the Blenderartist forums.

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Discussion

117 Responses to “Creating an Eyeball”
  1. Mads Alber
    Posts: 18

    Hey
    I have question about the texture..
    how can it be that you do not have to assign the texture material (eyeball) when you had to assign the other one (shiny lens)?

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    51
     Dec 3, 2010 at 1:41 pm
  2. Rich
    Posts: 2

    At 14:24 when u mouse wheel in on the falloff to scale u dont explain how to do it. Im kind of a newbie and dont know all the keys yet. It would really helpful if it was explained.

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    52
     Feb 8, 2011 at 7:08 pm
  3. Larry
    Posts: 2

    at 2:50 you make the part you pulled down wider, but didnt tell what you did to do that.

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    53
     Feb 14, 2011 at 12:53 pm
  4. Highlander
    Posts: 3

    at 2:38 when i try to select a centre its select almost everything how can i select only a center like you? im using blender 2.56b. plss help!

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    54
     Feb 20, 2011 at 1:42 pm
  5. James Bohling
    Posts: 7

    great tutorial, however i seem to have multiple issues…

    1. at ~9:50 while selecting the inner ring to extrude and scale, blender seems to be duplicating the lines and extruding and scaling them, leaving the original lines as they are.

    2. when we get to the seams and UV unwrapping, in the UV editor window, my UVs unwrap properly at the seams, however, parts of the UVs seem to overlap. to wit, there are 3 circles (for simplicity) and as i select part of the mesh or a UV, it will highlight in another circle. if i select one of the ends (small circles) part of the highlight will be in the larger and/or other circle.

    is this a user error or possible bug? i am using 2.56 latest build on a ubuntu machine.

    thanks!
    -b

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    55
     Feb 25, 2011 at 7:11 am
  6. Anthony
    Posts: 1

    Very cool. Love your tutorials. 28:12 made me laugh out loud >_<

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    56
     Mar 9, 2011 at 3:36 am
  7. Wayne Lee
    Posts: 3

    Great Stuff! I love your tutorials, only wish you had time to go back and update the ones done in older versions of Blender to the newest version. You have taught me a lot, keep it up!

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    57
     Mar 25, 2011 at 1:11 pm
  8. Said Orellana
    Posts: 5

    thanks:

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    58
     Sep 9, 2011 at 9:58 am
  9. tom
    Posts: 2

    GREAT!!! tutorial. quick question for you if you didn’t have photoshop, could you use GIMP instead?

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    59
     Oct 8, 2011 at 3:11 am
  11. Ray
    Posts: 1

    At 7:13 I don’t know what happenned :D I guess that you copy the iris to paste it but how ?? And how to do a perfect draw of the iris color with photoshop, or gimp???? Thank for your answer :D

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    61
     Oct 8, 2011 at 4:21 pm
  12. Brandon Cory
    Posts: 1

    The alpha buttion doesnt show up in my blender. Can someone help please.

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    62
     Nov 1, 2011 at 7:44 pm
  13. riverdog
    Posts: 4

    Great tut, but you get to mumbling in the narration and we cant here what you are saying. Even with the volume turned up.

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    63
     Nov 8, 2011 at 9:34 am
  14. Patrick Staudt
    Posts: 1

    Loved it, made much fun to watch the tutorial. Also i try to post my rendering…

    thx Mr. Ward

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    64
     Dec 21, 2011 at 6:27 pm
  15. Christine Osborne
    Posts: 1

    Excellent tut!! I learned a lot from this!! Thanks for sharing. Also I had no problems hearing you or had too much trouble following. :]

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    65
     Jan 20, 2012 at 4:27 pm
  16. Tayne
    Posts: 4

    I have a problem… (5:16) there is no alpha button, how can I fix this?

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    66
     Jan 26, 2012 at 4:45 pm
  17. furlow
    Posts: 18

    I love this tutorial, great making realistic. Unfortunatly I think they changed somethin when they went to 2.61, using same settings makes the outter eye all greyed out. Any sugestions how fix it?

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    67
     Feb 1, 2012 at 12:29 pm
  18. Pavlina Pavlova
    Posts: 2

    Great tutorial, thank you so much!
    Sadly I am experiencing some problems: I also use 2.60 and have a problem when switching from Z Transparency to Raytrace. The “shiny lens” is transparent with all the settings from the tutorial, but after rendering there is nothing on the screen but the glossy light spot on the outer sphere.. Any Ideas?
    Thank you,
    Pavlina

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    68
     Feb 11, 2012 at 1:46 pm
    • Pavlina Pavlova
      Posts: 2

      Nevermind.. I figured it out. I deleted the materials and added them again.. and it worked :)

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      68.1
       Feb 12, 2012 at 5:17 am
  19. Jaime Kang
    Posts: 1

    Fantastic blog wonderful article.Really thanks a ton! Cool.

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    69
     Feb 15, 2012 at 3:22 pm
  20. duley
    Posts: 2

    Hi I am in doubt when you put your dirty Raytrace of error and the render.
    http://www.duley.art.br/duvida.jpg

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    70
     Feb 21, 2012 at 6:09 pm
    • jeremiah r
      Posts: 440

      usually when you get artifacts like that in that picture on the left it means there are faces right on top of each other. so not sure if your outer eye is just too close to the inner or if you accidentely made 2 outer eyes and just need to delete one, or just in edit mode push a to select all then push w then remove doubles usually clears that up to. hope that helps

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      70.1
       Jul 7, 2012 at 5:03 pm
  21. Matthew Vermeulen
    Posts: 10

    im using blender 2.60 and when i save the uv image to go and edit it in gimp the uv lines dont show and when i take a screen shot of the uv map and am finished editing etc and apply it the iris area is like off target as if the uv mapping was in the wrong area if i could put it that way can anyone help?

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    71
     Feb 28, 2012 at 3:33 pm
  22. FRA
    Posts: 1

    Before doing a tutorial learn to speak.
    NOW ajhdhfjfkmcncjdkdk WE TAKE fhjdjdjkkkskddhffhjjkekj THIS mtz du du OOKEy
    It sounds like this and it’s a waste of time to see a tutorial like that.

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    72
     Mar 8, 2012 at 4:43 pm
  23. duley
    Posts: 2

    http://vimeo.com/2830890

    chupa \o/

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    73
     Mar 9, 2012 at 9:13 am
  24. mohamad bilal pro
    Posts: 1

    hi! at 18:46 how you can scale the eye .I try but i cant pleas help me pleeeeeeas

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    74
     Mar 23, 2012 at 7:37 am
  25. koolkat6657
    Posts: 1

    hello i’m just wondering what the URL on vimeo is for this video?

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    75
     Mar 25, 2012 at 1:14 am
  26. haledelano
    Posts: 1

    Hey Im having a problem when I create a circle there is no fill option under radius is FIll TYPE and the default is set to NOTHING with the options of TRIANGLE FAN & NGON, & under that is ALIGN TO VIEW and coords. How do it fix this?

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    76
     Jul 3, 2012 at 3:31 pm
  27. jeremiah r
    Posts: 440

    This is probably the best way to do an eye and with a little messing around with textures can be super realistic that there really is no need to have other eye models you can just switch the textures for different colors. Thanks david you rock. I tried the tut when i was noob and couldnt quite grasp it but after I came back to it after learning blender for awhile I got it quite easily and I use it on most my models that need eyes. cya

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    77
     Jul 7, 2012 at 5:07 pm
  28. @dallyesss
    Posts: 1

    at 9:16, how you do that??

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    78
     Jul 23, 2012 at 2:16 pm
  29. Paul Hertroys
    Posts: 3

    Apparently, I’m the only one having problems with the fractals part when subdividing. In the tutorials the iris neatly stays two dimensional. With my iris the fractal becomes three dimensional, which doesn’t help me a lot moving on with the iris part. What am I doing wrong here?

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    79
     Dec 4, 2012 at 1:32 am
    • Epliza
      Posts: 16

      You’re not the only one. I’m having this problem too, I think it’s because of the new version of Blender. It worked fine when I was doing it in May 2012.

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      79.1
       Dec 5, 2012 at 1:59 pm
      • Paul Hertroys
        Posts: 3

        Yep, made the iris with an earlier version of blender and that worked. Odd though to have to work with two versions. Now I need to sort out the UV editing. Doesn’t map that well.

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        79.1.1
         Dec 30, 2012 at 3:24 pm
  30. Ricardo Fonseca
    Posts: 1

    I’m having a problem when you get to uv editing and go from texture paint to edit mode, it doesn’t copy the layout to the left side. can someone explain me how to fix that situation ?

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    80
     Dec 21, 2012 at 10:13 am
  31. norvman
    Posts: 16

    There at the end… when you were having trouble rendering shadows from transparency…

    Remember all other materials you want effected by the transparency must have “Recieve transparency” turned on…

    Properties > Materials > Shadow > check the box for ‘Recieve Transparency…

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    81
     Feb 15, 2013 at 3:54 pm
  32. Philip Gosney
    Posts: 4

    lol I was there shouting at the screen turn Traceable off!

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    82
     Apr 21, 2013 at 5:35 am
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