3L Eye Material in Blender (eyes of ch4 skins and onward)

[dire badger]

I currently have it set up as a single node group (duplicated) that has different outputs for the image UVs and then also for the final shader, I can separate them into 2 different node groups though if it'll make adding this easier (if you do add this, ofc)!

Also the groups share some values that are used for both UVs and actual shading stuff so they're connected at the bottom, so one side will follow this other (ofc, you can also just put the values in separately on each side so they don't need to connect to each other... hope that makes sense)

I can make any other changes if needed, I really just think it'd be nice to have this stuff built into FP

all the parameter names are the same as in-game btw!

[knotty badger]

Random question but how do you know what colrs the tint and stuff are? Bc idk

[dire badger]

If you export the eye material of a skin as a .json in fmodel, it tells you all the values for these things

[knotty badger]

Ah ok ty!

[dire badger]

I think fn porting also will bring them into blender as RGB and Value nodes to the right of the output node, but it might not idk

[knotty badger]

Ty ill try both

[dire badger]

they show up here if there's anything specific you need to put in

(there's a few things that aren't implemented on the node group I made, but they don't really do much from what I've seen so it should be fine, mainly just emission refraction stuff I think)

But ye apart from that, just make sure you're using your skin's actual eye textures (obviously) as well and you should be all set

and you might wanna connect these in case you need to change any of these 4 values at the bottom (helps keep them consistent)

[knotty badger]

Yep! (Sometimes the eyes have there own textures but most of the time is the head texture)

[dire badger]

yep

[knotty badger]

Lemme open fmodel real quick to get comets stuff

[knotty badger]

What one of these would have the values or both srry for asking so many things

[dire badger]

should be the first one!

just open it in notepad or something like that

you should alos be able to just open it in fmodel

[knotty badger]

Idek what im looking for in it

[dire badger]

lemme show, one sec

[knotty badger]

Thank you so much for the help

[dire badger]

ye np!

so you look for the ScalarParameterValues, and itll tell you the parameter and what you need to put in for the value

[knotty badger]

What about the tint color and those things?

[dire badger]

in this case you only need to worry about the first 2 on this material, idk what RefractionDepthBias is because it seems to always be 0

[dire badger]

if there isn't anything for it, you don't need to change it

[knotty badger]

Ah ok

[dire badger]

just leave everything else as default

for the most part, human eye materials shouldnt need to be changed much too look fine

just gotta plug the textures into the node group and you shuld be all set

[dire badger]

just copy the 4th image up here ig

[knotty badger]

Ok

It also make a really big difference (first one is your 3L eye thing and second one is default fn porting)

[dire badger]

ayy nice

[dire badger]

Ye it's because Fortnite porting doesnt have a proper eye material

(which is why i made it)

(so hopefully half adds it🙏🙏🙏)

[knotty badger]

Fr and yours is amazing

[dire badger]

TY

[knotty badger]

I see there is no refratciondepthbias slot or im just blind

[dire badger]

there is none

it's not used so i didnt bother adding

i think it's always 0

so ye

[knotty badger]

It seems like it

[dire badger]

idek what it does anyways

[knotty badger]

Same anyway where would a "Eye visualize cornea" go

[dire badger]

dw about that

thats for debugging

i think?

what skin are you doing?

[knotty badger]

Opal now bc i finished comets eye thingy (thanks for your help)

[dire badger]

ok yeah dw about eye visualize cornea

it's for debugging like what I thought

so not needed

[sacred spoke]

im probably trippin but the lighting in those photos looks gorgeous!? i have no idea how to make evee look that good

[dire badger]

Contact shadows on each light, ambient occlusion (2 m), screen space reflections >>>>

[turbid quiver]

Congrats @dire badger, you are now level 7!

[fluid sinew]

this shader is useful asl

[dire badger]

I'm glad !

[sacred spoke]

for some reason on the ageless and stellan plugging in the eye uvs node it stretches the eyes.

[dire badger]

their aspect ratios must be different? idrk

make sure you match everything from the actual material with the node group

[uncut viper]

Is there any chance that this node setup could also be used for creating eye dilation?

[coral pecan]

thanks! (i dont use blender)

[viscid jolt]

i recreated that material entirely procedurally in unreal but i couldnt figure it out with blender nodes so i honestly just ended up baking a lot of this into 2 textures for the normal map and highlights 💀 only downside being its only for the human head textures really

i noticed your material seems to distort the eyes tho you might wanna look into that

it should ideally only change how the light bends on the iris with the normal map and has the spheres to add the highlights since thats how it works in game
good work though!! its really close just needs some fine tweaking

[dire badger]

yeah there's some issues with the faked refraction, i keep meaning to look into it but havent had much time

[viscid jolt]

ahh thats fair yeah

[versed cedar]

you think this is ready for implementation?

ready whenever you are

[dire badger]

i keep forgetting to update itsjfjskdf

ill do that now

[versed cedar]

no rushj

just letting you know im ready whenever you think it's done!!

@dire badger and idk if you wanna do it or you want me to do it, probs separate the input shader and output shaders if possible

[dire badger]

alrighty!

[dire badger]

i have this little section for the shared values (used both before and after the textures), should I keep it or is it not worth it

only reason why i have it is to be consistent but ig if it's done automatically, then it doesn't matter

[versed cedar]

yeah ik your intentions

cleaner to separate the logic if possible tho

[dire badger]

got it

ty

[versed cedar]

esp if those sockets

are being driven by these

[dire badger]

getting there

the refraction is just very wonky still so i just need to redo that

then it'll be all set

tbh it doesn't even look bad without refraction?

much better than this at least

still gonna see if i can get it to work right though ofc

[versed cedar]

dub

lookin good

[kindred tangle]

Hey @dire badger , thanks for making this shader! I made some tweaks to make it a bit more accurate w.r.t rotations, however, it relies on the eyes being their own objects. I'm not too knowledgeable when it comes to shader dev, so I'd be curious to hear if you have any thoughts on a way to fix this? Pictured is the 'fix' on the front most eye with the back most eye still attached to the armature which I believe changes 'object space' based calculations.

Also, as an added bonus, I ported this shader to Unity for my Rufus VRChat avatar (I am also a raccoon enjoyer 🦝 ), it mostly works but the distortion of the eyes is a little noticeable when they rotate because I apply a similar fix there too. But it came out really well regardless, thank you for making it open source =D.

[dire badger]

oh that's awesome!

the main issue I'm having is the distortion with rotation and stuff so it's nice you could figure it out for yourself!

[kindred tangle]

Ah I'd be happy to share my changes with you!! Let me copy them over to the file you uploaded and I can reupload if you're interested?

[dire badger]

im pretty much just looking at how the nodes are done in UE and trying to copy those over but if you could show me thatt, it would be so awesome

[turbid quiver]

Congrats @dire badger, you are now level 9!

[dire badger]

i appreciate it

[kindred tangle]

Here it is!! Do note that if this shader were attached to the eyes attached to the default FN armature, the refraction would mess up again. I think what needs to happen is somehow transforming 'world' space to 'eye space' instead of 'object space' where 'eye space' is the origin of each individual eye after armature modifications. Unfortunately, I have no idea how that would be done with my current knowledge.

I hope this helps :D? Also, curious where you can find the UE nodes for the eye shader?

[dire badger]

honestly half might be able to implement that, just seperating the material into it's own object, but idk

[versed cedar]

worst comes to worst we separate the eye mat from the head!!

I don't see anything wrong with that

easy fix

[dire badger]

i was trying to look at it more and ig it just read what redhaze said wrong 😭

so it's the armature modifier on them messing up the refraction

It's kinda annoying to work with but if each eye is seperated into their own object, then using a child constraint to each eye bone, it works perfectly

ig it's since the eye mesh isn't technically moving with the armature modifier, but it is with the child of modifier

trying to see if i can do anything about that through shader nodes but i doubt it

[kindred tangle]

good luck 🫡 . i'm very curious what you do to fix it if you figure it out!!

also, sorry for my poor explanation ha

I think the transformation matrix to object space is based on the origin of the mesh.

in Unity though, it's based on the 'root node bone' when using a skinned mesh renderer. This took me quite a while to figure out 😄

[simple canopy]

Do you think something could be done with geometry nodes to help fix that issue? There might be a way to trick the eyes into acting as if they were their own separate objects without actually separating them from the main mesh 🤔

[kindred tangle]

@simple canopy , mayhaps. I was playing around with the idea. I think if you can construct the world to object matrix such that the eye is treated as if it were its own object rather than part of a larger mesh (i.e. the character itself), then I think you'd just need to replace all the world to object nodes in the shader with world to some custom object space. I know you can retrieve position and normal before mesh deformation using geometry nodes and reordering the geometry modifier above the armature modifier. But I think you may need to bake the eye position, normal, and maybe tangent (whatever is needed to create a new coordinate space relative to the eye rather than the armature's origin) with origin set to the same pivot as the eye bone.

At the same time, I find it hard to believe this is what epic does in their eye shader, there has to be some simpler way!!

[dusk tiger]

isn't it already like that (idk why im replying this late)

[versed cedar]

working on implementing it rn

it all looks fine to me

i dont see any issues with refraction when it's on the character mesh

[versed cedar]

is this properly separated?

bc the one redhaze sent is still one group

like

these are the only shared parts right?

so i would just need to replicate thoee params on both

oh and this

i just need to make sure everything is being set up properly and properties are being added to both when needed

[dire badger]

haven't sent the seperated one yet sorry

[versed cedar]

looks so much better 🙏

[versed cedar]

that's fine you dont technically have to

i just need to know which properties go where and i might be able to separate myself

unless you wanna do that with redhaze's then by all means go ahead, i can wait

[dire badger]

I mean I already have it all separated, it's just I haven't figured out a perfect way for refraction yet so I just haven't sent it

[versed cedar]

gotcha

i mean the refraction looks fine in redhaze's

what's wrong with this

[kindred tangle]

@versed cedar Try rotating the character 90 degrees then also try rotating the eyes around. If eyes are not their own objects, then stuff looks odd

90 degrees so they face a different direction while standing up that is, idk what axis that is

Specifically, the pupil warps and the refraction effect stops working

[patent oracle]

they are talking about this

90 rotation

0 rotation

[versed cedar]

ah I see

if this was copied from fn then why is this an issue

shouldnt the fix in their mat too

or is this a blender specific issue

[patent oracle]

curious where is the part of the shader that defines this?

might know the solution

[kindred tangle]

The tweaks were adding world to object transform nodes in certain places

[turbid quiver]

Congrats @kindred tangle, you are now level 4!

[versed cedar]

okay well imma put this off til it's fixed

[dire badger]

prob will just redo how I do the refraction then

[dire badger]

only reason why I didn't redo it from the start is because I'd have to ofc make all the parameters work as accurately as I can

it'll be worth it though

[dire badger]

ok this is much simpler than i thought

[patent oracle]

fr?

[dire badger]

pretty much done LOL

[patent oracle]

echo and I were looking to see how to recreate tangent to make it constant

[dire badger]

there's like 2 things i need to fix/adjust and it'll be doe

[patent oracle]

I guess we were making it harder than it had to be 😅

[kindred tangle]

Oo Im excited to see the solution 👀

[dire badger]

gonna go into a voice channel if anyone wants to see what i have so far

just gonna try to fix what i need to

[kindred tangle]

Ill be lurking silently coz im still at work lmao

[simple canopy]

You sound like me 😂 I've been using the VC during my work day as background noise/something to watch besides random YouTube tutorials 😅

[dire badger]

@versed cedar can I rename parameter names to be a bit cleaner or is that something you might wanna do yourself if at all? (I mainly just wanna remove 'Eye' from the beginning of each one)

[versed cedar]

yes

I can do mappings

[dire badger]

just to look cleaner

alrighty!

[versed cedar]

as long as you provide the original names for me to convert

[dire badger]

for all of them? or just for ones I change the name to something completely different

[versed cedar]

only name changes

the rest I can just add in if they're identical to the param names

[dire badger]

it's done i hope

tried on a bunch of different skins and they all worked well

also I didn't end up changing the names so they should be accurate

and i had to change this to a vector rather than a color because blender doesn't like negative values urgh

but anyways it should be all set :D

[simple canopy]

Is that a parameter that changes between skins, or is it basically always the same value? Since blender doesn't like negative color values I wonder how that parameter would work if it gets passed in by the material?

[dire badger]

so it works fine as a vector, just not a rgb value

since rgb values can't use negative values

i dont even know if there's a skin that uses it anyways

there's 3 different types of the highlights and most use one of the other 2

[simple canopy]

Oh I meant like if the material has that parameter with negative values, I wonder how FP is going to handle storing that since it usually adds vector params as colors. Although now that I think about it I don't think it would make it into a disconnected parameter since it would go directly into the node

[dire badger]

ohh

[versed cedar]

yesss

[versed cedar]

wait wtf

actually nvm

FLinearColor is float

should be fine

if it's being applied to a vector thing it should work

[versed cedar]

dub ty

will set this up soon

enjoy contributor role

[dire badger]

https://tenor.com/view/cat-cute-happy-jumping-gif-26555219

[versed cedar]

worked first try lol

marking this finished

[stuck jungle]

Is this it?

[dire badger]

yes

[stuck jungle]

Alright

thanks

[stuck jungle]

How do I change the color in nodes?

[dire badger]

there should be a bool to turn it on

one sec

[dire badger]

got distarcted mb

just turn UseEyeColorTinting to 1 and then you can change the color

[stuck jungle]

OMGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG

HOLY FRICK!

[stuck jungle]

Like this?

[dire badger]

if it changed the color then yes ?

[stuck jungle]

Do I just add the eyes?

Somthing looks off

[dire badger]

OH

no

[stuck jungle]

Oh

[dire badger]

you take the 2 node groups from the blend file

the pre and post ones

you put the pre before the textures and post after the textures

[stuck jungle]

Can I share my screen?

nvm

I just tryed to c and p

uh

[trim forum]

i donbt gat a single thing here

[patent oracle]

https://tenor.com/view/pat-good-job-patpat-gif-25554349

[jagged fossil]

Can you please add control over the position of the Iris in the materials nodes?

[patent oracle]

you talking about the eye color position?

[jagged fossil]

Color? No, I'm talking about the white dot

[patent oracle]

pretty sure that is a thing

[dire badger]

that is a thing

when you're changing it, go to RGB and adjust it from there

R = X position
G = Y position