SOFTWARE: ZBRUSH: WHAT'S A SIMPLE WAY TO CREATE EYES IN ZBRUSH?

Practical tips and tutorials from pro artists to improve your CG skills

- Glen Southern

Hatana El Jarn, Manchester

Eyes are easily the most important focal point on a character, and they can bring your design to life or leave it looking flat and dead. There is a phenomenon called the 'uncanny valley' where CG models just look unnervingly wrong, and it is often about the eyes. When you are building a character or creature in ZBrush it is good to put in some eyeballs early on, allowing you to model around them. You could also texture and paint them at the same time, to give your character that little bit of oomph while you are creating it.

I will guide you through an easy way to do just that, and I've been doing it this way in ZBrush for nearly 20 years. This way isn't going to give you an anatomically correct eye with the lens, sclera, pupil hole etc, but rather it will give you a glossy-looking eye that's just enough to bring the model to life. The main technique is using the symmetry function in ZBrush but adding in a radial setting. This then allows you to paint around the centre of the iris and pupil in just a few strokes. If you then change the material to give it that glossy look, you have a very effective-looking eye. You can even adjust the shape of the eyeball if you like to give it that bulge at the font, but I don't find that much detail is needed for simple stylised eyes.