pixelbudah

I have been planning to do a version of my 1950 Vickylane as a Cars character for a while now. I thought this is going to be so easy to do, how hard it can be, right? It’s just a plane with simple eyes!



Well, I wanted to be able to pose the Cars eyes in different poses and facial cars expressions (if you can call them that), so painted textures were out of the question. I really wanted to do this using procedural texturing cause I’m sure I can get a nice level of control and tweaks without going back and forth between Photoshop and Maya, trying to get that looks just right.

So I created a couple of setups, some of them using 2d ramps within ramps but nothing was working exactly as I wanted! I was so close to giving up on the procedural textures way and just do the Pixar Cars eyes texture in Photoshop. I had one more trick up my sleeve, an idea which I thought that it has to work, well at least I hoped it will.

So the Idea is pretty simple, I used the same concept that you would use to create texture for regular eyes texture, but with a twist

So let’s start! First of all, let’s define the parts of the cars eyes.



A. The windshield is the eye white;

B. We create a nurbs sphere which will act as our iris and pupil and we modify it by squishing one of the sides of the sphere as flat as you can. You might need to add an isoparm to hold the middle edge of the sphere. Feel free to use a polygon sphere. I just like using nurbs sphere for eyes texturing cause they are easier to handle and to modify without worrying if the sphere will hold its spherical shape.




C. Give it a name like Right_iris_pupilSphere, cause we will have a couple of spheres to create and this way we won’t end up with an outliner that has nurbssphere1, nurbs sphere2 and so on.

D. Duplicate the already created nurbs sphere for the iris and pupil, this new nurbs sphere will act as our cornea on which we will have that nice highlight, sparkle in the eyes. Don’t forget to resize the cornea nurbs sphere just so it’s slightly bigger than the iris and pupil nurbs sphere.
duplicated-nurbs.png

E. Before we start working on the Textures select each of the nurbs sphere we just created, and in the Attribute Editor under the nurbsSphereShape tab scroll to Render stats and uncheck Casts Shadows.

Now let’s build the Cars eyes procedural textures. I will be using VRay for Maya for the shading and rendering Tutorial

1. Let’s start with the pupil and iris eye texture, we start with a VRayLightMtl and call it something like VRayLightIris it’s the same as Maya’s Surface Shader. I’m using this type of texture cause I don’t want light to have a diffuse and specular effect on it, I just want to see the texture without light effecting it.



2. Next we create a 2d texture Ramp, call it RampIris middle click drag and drop it on the VRaylightMtl VRayLightIris That we just created earlier and link it to the color slot.




3. let’s work on the color of the Cars eyes Iris. Double click on the Ramp RampIris. Make sure that the Ramp Type is a U Ramp.

if you want to check out the rest of this tutorial please follow this link:
http://www.pixelophy.com/?p=876