Welcome to Maya 2016! I’m kicking things off with a tutorial on creating eyes in a really easy way. Get good eyes in like 10 minutes, seriously!

1. Eye modeling

The eye modeling in Maya is straightforward – two spheres, subdivided to look more round, are then slightly edited to create the sclera and iris, and the outer cornea. Easy!

2. Materials

I use a simple ramp, plugged in to a blinn, to create the entire look for the eye. The real key is using a circular ramp, and adding a dark shadow around the outside edge of the iris, and then gradate to a brighter color in the center of the eye. The rest of the eye (the sclera) is handled with another simple ramp, and the cornea is just a transparent shiny blinn! Easy!

3. Textures

You may be happy with the simple ramp eye alone – but I show how to add a bit of detail by quickly creating a texture in Photoshop. The texture is quickly sketched out, it should only take a few minutes.

Then the new texture is combined with the existing ramp by using a Layered Texture node. This means our detail is separate from our color – we can quickly create multiple eye colors for different characters by just changing our ramp color! Easy! Just watch the vid, you’ll see:

Maya 2016

This Maya 2016 eyes tutorial is a good kickoff to using Maya 2016. The user interface has changed, and at first glance it looks very different. But honestly, it hasn’t changed all that much – the icons are just slightly different looking. So far I like the newest version, it seems like it opens and saves files quicker than 2015.

10 minutes!

Mayyyybe a little more, depending on whether you create the texture, and how familiar you are with Maya’s Hypershade window. Seriously though, this is pretty easy, eyes are fairly simple if we keep them stylized ala Pixar eyes!