   Recommended Technique for Iris Movement in Eyes
  Right now I can only think of two ways of moving the iris and pupil1. Move the texture along the eye surface2. Assign the iris polygon to a bone.I'm curious, what is the most commonly used technique for this and is there a reason why?   
  try having the eyeballs as a submesh,and play with their rotation.   ;  I've thought about that one, but it seemed to me like that isn't really popular for games. The spherical shape seems like a waste of a fair amount of polygons and it wouldn't work very with with cartoony or odd shaped eyes.   ;  I've never done the individual iris before, but both eyes and eyelids are common.Our modelers rig both the eyes and eyelids for animation.  That's four total.  I assume they exist on their own little mesh, but that's up to the modelers.Bones are good because you probably already have support for them.  Artists know how to use them, and they can be scripted right along with every other animation.Texture animation requires engine support that may not be there.  It also requires coordination between both the animators and artists, whereas a rigged model only needs work from the animator.  If it is just one person doing both jobs then it may not be an issue.  If you have multiple people involved, coordination is more work.If you don't have support for texture animation, then I don't think this one feature is enough to justify the work.  If you have other texture animation features in mind then it may, but just a pupil animation is likely not enough for the investment.  In that case, just use a bone.If you have support for both in your game, then I'd leave it up to the person doing animation.  From the code side, running an animation script would be the same regardless of the script's content.  Your tools will make a difference, of course, but calling one script is generally the same as calling another.On some engines the number of bones is an issue.  If you don't have bones to spare for the eyes, then take the texture route.  We had to do that on a DS game, since the number of hardware-processed 3D bones is limited; 4 bones was quite a lot.   ;Quote:Original post by AntiGuyI've thought about that one, but it seemed to me like that isn't really popular for games. The spherical shape seems like a waste of a fair amount of polygons and it wouldn't work very with with cartoony or odd shaped eyes.The number of polygons is not much of an issue for modern graphics cards.  If they are properly batched and stored on card, there are other bottlenecks you will hit long before poly count.Articulated eyes are important in games, especially those with close-up camera shots in cinematic sequences.Cartoon eyes seem even more ideal for bones, since you can use squash-and-stretch with them.  A surprised cartoon character can go bug-eyed, which radically deforms the mesh.   ;  That's exactly the type of information I was looking for!Thanks a lot! I really wasn't expecting that much.You've convinced me the bone route is the way to go.   