Progress Update - February 2020 W01 (Patreon)

Hey everyone!

I'm still working on getting the eye implementation fully functional, so it's going to be a shorter post this week. I spent a lot of time delving deeper into the Source Engine code (both from the SDK and some of the old leaks) to get a better understanding of how the eyeballs in Source work, and I've got a better grasp of it all now. Turns out that despite what it says in the Valve Developer Community wiki, the eyes are not actually decals after all, so implementing that decal system wasn't actually necessary (it's still going to come in handy though). This is actually good news though, because it's going to make things a little easier going forward.

The basic eye implementation is working now (please ignore the right eye in the video, only the left eye is set up properly, since I'm still in the experimentation stage), but there's still a couple of issues left:

• No pupil dilation yet. This one shouldn't be much of a problem for the real-time rendering, getting it to work with Cycles may get a bit messy, however.

• The eyeball diameter is currently ignored (which is used to prevent the iris from rolling into the head).

• Source has two different eye shaders  – "Eyes" and "EyeRefract", both of which behave somewhat differently from each other. The "Eyes" shader is mostly used in older titles (like HL2), "EyeRefract" is more versatile and used in TF2 (and all newer titles I'm assuming). All models that use the "EyeRefract" shader should be working, but the iris scaling seems to work a little different for the "Eyes" shader, so that's something I'll still have to look into:

• Eyelid flexes don't move with the eyes yet. I'll have to take another look into the Leak source code to find out how that's handled in Source.

• I haven't added support for SFM projects with moving eyes yet, but this also shouldn't prove too much of a problem.

All in all this is taking a bit longer than I had planned, since my initial approach wasn't quite working out, but if all goes well the rest shouldn't take more than a couple of days now.

That's all for now, sorry I don't have more to show off this week!

Oh, and before I forget, a special shout-out to RED_EYE, who's created a Blender Plugin for the Pragma model format: https://github.com/REDxEYE/io_pragma_wmd 

So far it's only an importer, but I believe he's working on an exporter as well!

Anyway, thanks everyone, and have a great weekend! :)