New Mesh Eyes Will Revolutionize the Way Avatars Look -- and How We'll Photograph Avatars

Iris Ophelia's ongoing review of virtual world and MMO fashion

Damien Fate's latest release, FATEeyes [Marketplace page here], brings a pretty groundbreaking level of customization to our SL avatar's eyes, putting detailed control of their color and position right at your fingertips --  take a look at this demo video by fellow fashionista Strawberry Singh to see what I mean:

 

It's not just texture-changing and size control that makes these eyes such an awesome addition to your avatar's wardrobe, though. One simple slider, allowing you to control the direction of the eyes, makes these eyes a total must-have for SL photographers, artists, and bloggers alike. Let me show you...

The eyes themselves are mesh with a series of overlays that let you control the textures of nearly every facet of the eyes-- the pupils can even be animated to dilate naturally like real eyes, which is one of the neatest effects I've ever seen on an SL eyeball! But among all the size sliders and texture pickers on the control HUD, there's a simple little slider to change the direction of the eyes. You can click somewhere along it, or even drag your mouse back and forth over it to control the direction of your avatar's eyes in real time.

This is an absolute godsend for SL photographers and bloggers like myself, because getting an avatar to look in the right direction can be a huge thorn in their side. There are ways to control your avatar's eyes now but none are particularly elegant. Some HUDs and tools can lock them in a few different preset directions, or you can have your model alt-click on an object in the desired direction, but both of those options can be very awkward, and don't allow for much subtlety. And, when it comes to making an avatar look expressive and human, subtlety is absolutely crucial.

This system isn't perfect yet since, so far, you can only control the eye direction along one axis. However Damien also has a very good record when it comes to supporting existing products and releasing updates with bug fixes and new features, so I have no doubts that if he can find a way to implement a more complete directional function, he totally will.

Overall I'm a big fan of these new eyes and I can't wait to see what updates and additions will be made to them over time. You can pick up your own pair of FATEeyes on the SL Marketplace here!

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Iris Ophelia (Janine Hawkins IRL) has been featured in the New York Times and has spoken about SL-based design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan and with pop culture/fashion maven Johanna Blakley.

Comments

[Iggy]

Iris, I like the look. I have *NOT* liked the trend of recent styles I call "wet eyed" because I keep falling into the Uncanny Valley. You see those dreaded eyes with every log in to Marketplace.

Somehow these mesh eyes look realistic enough without being creepy. They are certainly an improvement over the "dead eyes" of years past, too!

[Aeonix Aeon]

Iris, my sincere kudos go to you for tackling one of the greatest subtleties in virtual worlds. While not perfect, they offer quite an advancement over previous generations with a dead eye look.

I believe I'll be wearing these myself. Thank you.

[Aeonix Aeon]

* Damien Fate... awesome stuff, really. Iris and Strawberry for bringing it to our attention. (I need more coffee here)

[Damien Fate]

Thank you for the excellent write up!

I have just released v1.2 update for FATEeyes that now locks the eyes into place when you're in the editing mode, to make customisation even easier!

[Nathan Adored]

I wonder if we'll see this package bundled/combined with some mesh avatars, with a specific-to-that-avatar set of eye details.

[Pussycat Catnap]

Much of this has long existed in the furry scene.

This: "the pupils can even be animated to dilate naturally like real eyes, which is one of the neatest effects I've ever seen on an SL eyeball!"

Is in several avatars I have.

The package puts it all together, and for human head-sized avatars (so far only a very few furry makers have shifted head scales down to human sized - something they can do now thanks to alpha maps. The newest from DSD for example: the Bunny and Ocelot. The eyes in those could possibly be put on a human avatar with a little tweaking).

Much of this looks like it could be done with prims. But I guess mesh gives it a crisper edge.

A question that is key: left alone, can the eyes be set to just follow what you're camera is looking at, like system eyes do?

Most furry eyes do that, but a few with scripted movement specifically don't (which is something that has been a let down on those furry avatars I've tried that were limited like that).

[Damien Fate]

Hi Pussycat,

To answer your question, these mesh eyes follow your regular eyes around as per normal. They combine the functionality of a highly customiseable eye with the ease of the base SL eye.

I'm sure that there are other eyes out there that have pupil scaling and such, I never claimed to be the first :)

The benefit of doing this in mesh over prim, is that the eye is a single object, just using specially layered 'faces' for the mesh to achieve this effect.

The eyes are also scaleable (you can even save the scale of the eye in the presets tab) so you can use them on regular avatars, furries, macro and micro alike.

Please feel free to try the demo to see for yourself how they work :)

[Damien Fate]

@Nathan,

If I ever find time to do more mesh avatars, I will most likely use this system to some degree for the eyes, maybe more.

[Dave Bell]

Good for photographs, yes.

Does it really make any difference for the rest of us? How many people look at the world with the sort of close-up camera positioning that makes an eye more than a few pixels on the screen?

This seems as mixed a blessing as using 1024-size textures.

[Tiffy Vella]

I really appreciate products that expand our choices. Some of us love having the chance to personalise our appearance, and change it often.

Many furry avatars have beautifully scripted eyes...so glad my human eyes can now have comparable features.

I picked up a pair today, and love them. One more part of my old LL avatar has been replaced by something better. Yay for pixel bionics, and thanks Damien. It will be enjoyable seeing how this product expands with time, as it has a lot of potential. (Imagine being able to add your own iris/pupil/etc textures to the hud..that'd be very cool.)

[Adeon Writer]

Dave Bell: Avatar detail, especially the face, and especially especially the eyes, get a pass, as small as they are, they are vital. You could put a quarter of viewer resources into eyes and face expressions and I'd call it fair.

It is the most important part of human interaction.

[Damien Fate]

@Dave Bell,

Just to clarify, the largest textures I use in the eyes are 512x512.

[Pussycat Catnap]

"I'm sure that there are other eyes out there that have pupil scaling and such, I never claimed to be the first :)"

Oh yeah. That part of my comment was to a bit of the blog.

I'm likely to pick this up at some point - simply because the combination of features is nice. There's a lot of things that some few others are doing in part... but I don't think anyone else was doing it all yet. And there -are- some things on the HUD that look original to me as well.

Just not the things the blog called out. With my background using furry avatars, what catches me is your use of the veins, slera, and the by RGB value color picker. The stand still, and all the saves - those are also great.

The list of textures - I've got a few eyes with multiple textures, but not a list that long.

What if I wanted a catseye or goateye texture?
- There's a button below the texture list that I can't make out on the screenshots here, which has me wondering.

To Dave: Human beings are trained to catch the eyes of those we see. This is an animal trait - any animal will do it. The little avatars on screen are a lot smaller... but you can very quickly feel alienated when dealing with someone who's avatar has 'dead eyes'.

- And when you start to feel really comfy with a person, at least for, I find I do start analyzing the face of their avatar and for good or bad, reading things into the person based on that...

Which has caused me to feel distanced from people who adopt those frowning women avatars, or the older 2008-09 era fad for 'neanderthal brow women'.

Having vibrant eyes - even though they are small on the screen, will really breath live into your AV.

I've had many people over my time in SL comment about my avatar's eyes. Partly because they are almost always a purple lightly glowing shade (I can't stand how so many furries adopt that neon glow look... all my furries have realistic colors. But at least in my AV's eyes... I do it too. :) ).
- So I know people notice this stuff.

[Canoro Philipp]

now we are gonna need some HUD to modify mesh avatars shape, it could bring more details than the Linden Lab sliders.

@Adeon Writer,

autistic people and blind people disagree that the eyes ¨It is the most important part of human interaction¨.

it remembers me of a new york artist who claimed that looking at someone else eyes is what made us human, suggesting that autistic people were less human, and blind people were not human at all.

[Ann Otoole InSL]

These look really good. And are very affordable. Good job.

[Dave Bell]

Just to clarify my point about texture sizes:

Check your screen height, and tell me how much of that height a 1024-pixel texture will take up. Practically, you probably see only a quarter of the texture area on a Prim, Mesh can UV-map more efficiently.

Either way, you can't get the benefit of those large textures on an add-on eye unless you cam-in quite close. It is nothing to do with how human brains might be wired to notice things: it is a fundamental limit of the rendering system and the display technology. The data doesn't get onto the screen.

There are things these eye-prim systems can improve, such as eye movements, but for most of us, most of the time, high resolution textures just add to the lag.