process of the ringmaster 1: eyes

As promised, here's the first of a series of behind the scene posts for the FLIP sting entry we made at Sector5 Studios. I will also use these to compare my skills with the skills i had when making Caged so expect a lot of comparisons.

For this post, I'll focus on the eye as there's a huge leap from Caged. For Caged, the eyes were shaded through basic material colours. For the Ringmaster, I decided to UV map and texture the eyes following the philosophy that the eyes are the first thing the viewer will look at in a character; so it was important for me to kick the bar higher that I set for myself with Caged by putting in effort in to the eyes.


Render comparisons of how they would look in their final state

The results were noticeable straight away but there is still a massive room for improvement as I was treating the Ringmaster as a test subject for texturing the eyes. For example, the iris can be improved a lot in its texture.


the ringmasters eye was originally going to be plain colours which I've labelled Caged style


The next big change is in the blend shapes. In Caged I created blend shapes for the pupil to increase and decrease in size but it still didn't look right. The reason for this was that the iris never changed in size. For the Ring Master I made sure to do this which meant extra blend shapes were needed for the iris, eyeball, and the cornea.



The difference is subtle but pays off in close shots as well as adding to the characters personality. In this case it exaggerates the ringmasters crazy personality with the blood shot eyes.

 Whilst there's a big improvement in the eyes in comparison to the eyes i made for the characters in Caged, there's still a huge room for improvement. Perhaps in the near future, I will have another comparison between a new project and the ringmaster.

You can catch both the FLIP Sting and Caged at this years FLIP festival later this month. For more details visit: http://www.flipfestival.co.uk/