Ugly Elven Eyes
Entry posted by Lupine00
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This is all about that little bit of flesh in the corner of your eye.
In Skyrim, it's made from a tiny number of polygons and has a texture that alphas out at the edge where it meets the eye.
It looks ... pretty bad on the best of days, if you zoom in close. The number of polygons and the way the alpha ended up being drawn in most eye textures means it leaves a visible gap, and really does look like some floating polygons that are jammed in the corner of the eye to fill in the gap in the head mesh.
But on elves...
It's way worse. So much worse. The eyes are scaled up, and this little splotch is twisted and made bigger. It really shows off how poor it looks, but on top of that, you will often see a bit "missing" from it, as if cut out.
Today I set out to track down what was causing this.
The root cause is that the eye also has a shadow for beneath the lid, and this is also a few badly aligned polygons with an alpha texture on.
It turns out that a great many eye textures do not create this alpha correctly - it's not quite zero, and doesn't fade early enough.
The result is that the shadow polygons go in the z-buffer and partially block rendering of the eye-corner polys.
The fix is to either move the eye-shadow polygons over a bit (this is quite tricky to do, but you can do it in racemenu sculpt, or NifSkope), or to adjust the alpha in the eye textures you are using so it fades out early enough.
It bugs me that there are no high-resolution eyes. Probably some issues to do with facial expressions there.
A job for another day is to import an existing eye mesh into Blender and properly adjust the vertices so that the shadow doesn't overlap the little corner piece at all, and both parts fit better.
Whether or not a proper high-resolution eye is possible, or blocked by morph limitations I don't know. I guess the existing morphs could be reverse engineered and recreated, but sounds tricky.
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