Modeling the Eyes

If your game uses many real-time cut-scenes, chances are your character will need facial animation. The eyes play a huge part in acting; we are all drawn to the eyes when we interact with people.

Eyes are relatively easy to construct; all you need to do is create a sphere and optimize it slightly. You may have noticed that our model already has some spheres where the eyes should be. These were used earlier to create the eyelids, and we did not delete them. To demonstrate how to create the eyes, we will remove these spheres and start from scratch.

1.	Create a new polygonal sphere with its Subdivisions Around Axis and Subdivisions Along Height both set to 8 (Figure 4.38a). Figure 4.38. Optimize a sphere to achieve an eye shape.
2.	As demonstrated in Figure 4.38b, remove the back half of the sphere.
3.	Select the edges that lie down the center of the sphere, shown in Figure 4.38c, and then collapse them to get the eye shape (Figure 4.38d).
4.	Position this sphere so it lies where the left eye should be.
5.	To create the right eye, duplicate the left eye mesh and alter the Translate X attribute in the Channel Box to be a negative value. For example, if it reads 0.38, make it 0.38.

There we have it; the eyes are done (Figure 4.39). Feel free to save at this point.

Figure 4.39. Kila now has eyes.