Nyeng!

Problems like the one with Daisy’s eyes really annoy me…  with all the other things still left to do, problems like that suddenly become top priority, which for me usually means at least a day will be wasted trying to solve the puzzle.

After playing around with the shaders and projectors, I may have found a way to keep the old eyes.  The first step was to create a spherically-projected black & white ramp, with no color interpolation.  The color positions and the projector were then adjusted so the front of the eye would be white, changing to black just beyond the eyelids’ max. range.

While this map will be connected to the shader’s opacity, an extra step needs to be taken for the shadows.  On its own, Mental Ray will ignore the transparency, and render the shadows on the surrounding objects as if the eye were still visible.  Connecting the ramp to a shadow shader (p_shadow_transparency) fixes this nicely.

Now for the really stupid part…  after spending this much time on a problem, it seems there’s always something stupid I’ve overlooked.  Sure enough, once I finished assembling the shader, I noticed that the roof of her mouth is actually at least half an inch above the top of her gums.  After pulling the geometry down her eyes still poke through, but now it’s much easier to correct the problem with a lattice deformer.