Marmoset experiments - Eyes & facial hair

Another day of playing with Marmosest, learning on how to prepare my FMP assets to make my life easier while trying to achieve a higher degree of realism!

Today I learnt the basics of making an eye with the Peter Zoppi method. It's a very creative use of baking & UV unwrapping. However, I feel like I could certainly improve my result and that I'm not quite there yet. 

Firstly I used marmoset (!!!) to bake (!) my eyeballs. I've baked an eyeball with an iris 'concave to a low poly eyeball containing a small bump for the cornea. 

Then I've textured it, added some black magic effects and made it glossy with a separate mesh sitting over my eye object.

The black bits around the eye are supposed to blend the eyelids with the eye but I'm not sure this method works for me, I'll keep testing. It's basically a piece of the eyelid mesh put over the base mesh with transparency & blur effects.


This felt very uncanny valley so I decided I cannot stop working until I add some lashes and brows. For that I have used fibermesh in Zbrush as it allows for very quick facial hair generation. I would not use this for head-hair as they vary too much and there's too much detail, but for lashes it was very quick and simple. I clumped them, smoothed them out, adjusted with the move tool and they were ready to go.

Lashes required a very simple material set up, one thing that surprised me is how well the metallic setting works on them, it makes them very dark and prominent which is what I wanted as I'll be applying make up to my character later on.

I struggled with the brows because I didn't want ridiculously bushy brows (like on the screenshot below) but wanted a good level of coverage so that they don't look sparse. To fix that I painted over the skin texture and it worked pretty well. I'm not gonna continue working on them until I have my hair in place to make sure they work well together.

Aaaand here's the final look for today! I've also added another layer of mesh over the lips with a normal map and a high gloss factor for that lip-gloss look! Also, finally found out why my skin texture was looking ghoulishly gray and fixed it as well. It was the tint over my albeido map ^^