The Impossibly Complex Art Of Designing Eyes

[HardOCP News]

I thought this article on the difficulty of creating eyes in video games was particularly interesting. Even though we are getting a lot closer with game engines like UE4, there is still something not quite right when you see them in-game.

"It’s hundreds of times, if not an order of magnitude or two more [away]," says Brian Karis, senior graphics programmer at Epic Games, speaking about the processing power it would require to render the perfect, convincing eye in real time. Indeed, because eyes (and faces) are so difficult to get right, many games simply slap sunglasses or a helmet on their protagonists. Franchises like Deus Ex, Halo, and even Call of Duty make a habit of this, no doubt because it saves a lot of effort.

 

[lironmiron]

Except for a few scenes, I thought the eyes in Uncharted 4 looked pretty convincing. Maybe not in a photorealistic kind of way, but very convincing in their own stylized way. The characters almost never had the typical deer-in-the-headlights look.

 

[Prisoner849]

Dunno....I dig on the Fallout 3 unblinking stare. I'll take weird over real sometimes.

 

[ZippZopp]

cool article. It is a very complex problem. I work as a character artist the game industry and it is something we've struggled with many times over. there are so many variables to be considered....modeling, texturing, shading, lighting and movement etc. if any of these are slightly off, people notice. certainly one of the biggest hurdles is the lighting and shading of the eyeball because we don't have advanced ray tracing inside of a game engine.

 

[pxc]

Eyes are so well known by most people that any deviations look strange. The face picture linked in OP has eyes that look like plastic or glass - doll eyes.

The one thing that bothers me, and it seems easy to fix, is how upper and lower eye lid membranes are generally absent, making the eyeball look like it's floating behind paper thin skin. It couldn't be very complex to add to the meshes and textures to fix that.

 

[Deleted member 93354]

cool article. It is a very complex problem. I work as a character artist the game industry and it is something we've struggled with many times over. there are so many variables to be considered....modeling, texturing, shading, lighting and movement etc. if any of these are slightly off, people notice. certainly one of the biggest hurdles is the lighting and shading of the eyeball because we don't have advanced ray tracing inside of a game engine.

Digital Cliff problem?

I noticed a problem with not so much the eyes, but over stated movements of character actors that are getting digitized. Their exaggerated movements make face movements look "unnatural"

 

[Deleted member 134608]

Over-saturated plastic and glass looking models with studio bright lights don't help either. Eyes are only part of the issue. Devs need to tone things down as a start, if they ever hope to get out of uncanny valley. Here is the same image with things turned down a few notches and a bit of blur to get rid of sharp edges:

 

[Deleted member 134608]

I also noticed that if you look at photos of people, the whites of the eyes should not have the glass transparency and reflection. Only the Iris/Pupil. That is why the rendering looks so weird.

 

[Deleted member 134608]

This looks more real to me.

*I don't know who made this rendering. Its not my work, I just photoshopped it.