Look into my eyes: How Disney is perfecting animated eyeballs

The narrator points out that each eye is unique, and describes a photographic capture system that looked at nine different eyes and recreated each individual’s peepers. The result is realistic, with veins, lumpy sections on the cornea, and the pits and grooves that define a person’s colored iris. They even take into account how reflective each section of the eye is, so as it shifts the reflections within the eye change too. The capture method and reconstruction can even keep track of how the iris deforms as the pupil dilates…

It’s not just Disney who might want to make realistic faces, of course. Video games have been pushing into the realm of realism, with games like The Last of Us and Get Even. Most of the time that’s done without image-capturing an actor’s eyes, but rather using production techniques after the fact. In Sony’s documentary on the making of The Last of Us, the game’s animators talk about creating realistic eye motions by watching the human performances recorded for game production (warning: game spoilers in that video).