Eyes too dark in blender

[dvnobles]

Just want to make sure I'm not missing something here, as when I export/import MHX everything seems to come in pretty good except the eyes. I checked the FAQ, skimmed the forum and searched as well, but did not see the answer.
The eyes are not black - but just too dark. Latest version of MH and Blender and rendering in Cycles. My work around has been to put a light panel in front of the character, specifically for the eyes and then remove the "glossy" node from the eyes and add an emission node - then I normally set it at about 1.2 in strength. This, of course, gives the eyes an unnatural look, but without doing this the eyes are little more than a dark socket. Any ideas on why the dark eyes using MHX?
Thanks,
//Dan

[loki1950]

I have not had any real issues with the eyes under cycles but then I usually use image based lighting if you are using regular lighting try adding what photographers call a key light(key features ie face) then the normal shadows caused by the eye sockets are filled and you get proper reflections from the eyes themselves vary the light intensity for the effect you what.

Enjoy the Choice

[Aranuvir]

The eye texture has an alpha channel. When the alpha channel gets disconnected in the default mhx2-setup the eyes turn very dark. And there could also be a problem with your computing device. I had transparency, lighting and other problems with my AMD graphics card (8970M) (found this out when AMD dropped the Linux support for my card and I happened to rerender a scene on my CPU). Usually you get full feature support on cycles by rendering on the CPU. Perhaps make a quick preview render on your CPU, that should be enough to evaluate the lighting.

[joepal]

Maybe you can provide a screenshot of a render and your node setup? There are a bunch of different reasons why things might look dark, but they tend to look different.

[punkduck]

Just want to make sure I'm not missing something here, as when I export/import MHX everything seems to come in pretty good except the eyes. I checked the FAQ, skimmed the forum and searched as well, but did not see the answer.
The eyes are not black - but just too dark. Latest version of MH and Blender and rendering in Cycles. My work around has been to put a light panel in front of the character, specifically for the eyes and then remove the "glossy" node from the eyes and add an emission node - then I normally set it at about 1.2 in strength. This, of course, gives the eyes an unnatural look, but without doing this the eyes are little more than a dark socket. Any ideas on why the dark eyes using MHX?
Thanks,
//Dan

Long time ago I made my models using blender render, then I changed to cycles render. When you make that and forget the transparent node, the eyes are black. But normally, when you import the character already using cycles render, this will not happen (as you correctly mentioned). The eyes seem to be darker then in makehuman (well at least in my opinion ).

But going this way I learned, how the eyes are designed. It is a double layer. One intended to be glass, the other one texture. In makehuman you get the cool effects, when you look into the eyes and turn the character because of a special litsphere.

Well, when you also think the eyes are too dark, here is my setup. I assign the outer layer to a pseudo-glass layer (to get a few effects, like mirror) and the inner layer contains the texture. Make the glossy node really white (#ffffff) for the glass! You then may simplify the texture layer, like I've done it. The rest is shown in the picture.

By the way that is only one solution to lighten the eyes. Emission ... hmm ... maybe for special comic character this is a good idea

Maybe your character will look better when you make it my way. I don't know. I hope it has nothing to do with a GPU problem, because I also wanted to change from MacOS back to Linux somewhere in the future ..

[dvnobles]

Maybe your character will look better when you make it my way. I don't know. I hope it has nothing to do with a GPU problem, because I also wanted to change from MacOS back to Linux somewhere in the future ..

Hi all and thanks for the kind suggestions. Punkduck, thanks for your nicely detailed description of how you do the eyes! This worked great. Here is where I'm at so far...
I tried to reproduce my own problem, but found I could not...they eyes were coming in kind of ok! But I am doing it on a laptop where I normally work on my desktop PC. So...I am thinking that it IS actually my GPU that might be causing the issue (Nvidia GTX 980) Laptop is using an Nvidia Quadro M2000M, but I get same result (ok eyes) with both CPU and GPU render. I will try on my desktop to see if I can reproduce the issue.
But anyway, with your method punkduck, it looks great...btw, I usually make glass the way you do - never have really liked the 'glass' node. I am actually making cartoon characters, but in my process I need to start out as realistic as I can get and then I change them with filters in Photoshop, so this will help me out quite a bit I think!
Thanks again all, I will see what happens on my desktop and report back.
//Dan

[Aranuvir]

My remarks about the graphics card were mostly based on the table on this site: https://www.blender.org/manual/render/c ... tures.html. Even though AMD is providing developers to blender, now, it is currently very obvious which graphics card to choose...

[blindsaypatten]

I followed Punkduck's instructions and the eyes look 100% better. This leads me to the question, why isn't this the default?

[joepal]

Because MHX2 only provides a one-size-fits-all node setup. It doesn't know exactly what mesh it is constructing a material for, it just plugs in the diffuse, normal and other maps into the right sockets and provides a reasonable least common denominator for the rest.

[punkduck]

I followed Punkduck's instructions and the eyes look 100% better. This leads me to the question, why isn't this the default?

Yepp. It is like Joel says. I think, that this may be improved a little, because not all the parameters you can change in the material editor are used by the importer.
But especially in this case this won't help. We have another problem: the eyes are only one object and so you can only supply one material. Same thing with e.g. the lips. If you want to make them glossy, you have to change part of the skin or use methods we allready discussed in the forum.

Well I'm using Makehuman to create the "product off-the-rack" and after exporting I started the fine-tuning in Blender. When I've to do it again, I append the old materials to the new character and throw away the exported ones, but of course this sometimes is a lot of work. But we also have to take in consideration that we have a lot of users who need a game character with less vertices, a simpler rig etc. or doing characters in comic style ... and of course there is not only Blender waiting for the characters

On the other hand we have people with real good knowledge of anatomy (like you have) or using the characters in science or simulation.

I guess it is a challenge for the MH team to find the right balance ...