The Eyes Have It
[Page 2 of 7]

11. Save this second file as a TIFF as "irisbump1.tif" in your Textures directory. This will serve as both our bump map and our specular map.

The iris specularity/bump map created in Photoshop

All done with that. Time to move into Amorphium Pro.

The eyeball
The first thing I want to build is the eyeball. This will actually comprise three sphere meshes. Why three? Well, the eye is kind of funny in that it has the white part and also a clearish layer of goo on top of that. In addition, I like to add a little bit of blue to the whites of my eyes because, well, the whites of many eyes are actually a bit blue (significantly blue in babies). So let's get started.

1. Create a sphere in the center of your Composer window using the Sphere Mesh tool. Make it big but manageable, and leave enough room in your Composer window for some scaling. (You can shrink it down to match your face later).

The Mesh Sphere creation tool in the Composer
workspace. You can drag out palettes from the
main toolbar in the Composer.

2. Duplicate your sphere twice. (It will help you to name each sphere in your timeline. I call my spheres "Outer," "Inner" and "Innerinner" for reasons that will become apparent momentarily.) You can duplicate an object by Control clicking on it and then selecting "Duplicate" from the contextual menu that pops up. (You can also just right click, if you have a multi-button mouse in either Macintosh or Windows.) Don't use the command for copying (Command-C), as it will close your project.

Click Image To Watch!

The Duplicate command appears in an object's
contextual window, which can be accessed
by right clicking the object). Click to see
this in action (1.1 MB QuickTime).

3. In the timeline, deselect anything that's selected, and then select the object called "Inner." Using the Scale tool, drag on your Composer window until "Inner" becomes slightly larger than the other two spheres.

Use the timeline to select and deselect objects that are
hidden from your view in the Composer window.

4. Now, in the timeline, deselect "Inner," and select "Outer." Using the Scale tool, drag in your window until this becomes the largest sphere. Not too tough, right? Now your largest sphere is "Outer;" your middle sphere is "Inner;" and your smallest sphere is "Innerinner."

The Scale tool in the Composer workspace

Now we're going to do a few tweaks to each one of these spheres to get them to produce the desired effect. Namely, we're going to add just a little bit of shape to them, and then we're going to go in and change their material properties.

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