OK, for me at least, this is game changing, as in I've been trying to achieve it since my days playing with Poser. Some of our supernatural characters need glowing eyes, especially in dim light, because why wouldn't they? Vampires, demons, succubi...pick one. I've always tried to achieve this effect by playing with the materials of the character's iris, with disappointing results. I wanted the eyes to glow from within, and the effect always looked artificial, tacked on, and unrealistic.
I had an epiphany the other night. If they should glow from within, something inside of them should be glowing, right? Not the iris, but something inside of the eye. This led me to look at the materials tab for G8F, hoping that there would be a 'retina' material, but there was not. After all, why would there be? It's unseen, what's the point? That led me to brainstorm, and I came up with the stupidest simple solution. You will see the results below.
I created two sphere primitives. I scaled them down, and placed them inside of G8F's eyeballs. Parent them to the eyeballs! Otherwise, when you move or pose the figure, you lose your effect. Here's the really important part: set the opacity of the iris to 0.9. In images where the effect is turned off, the look is basically the same, as in the first image in the collage I've added to this. When it's turned on, in bright light, the effect is subtle, as you can see in the second image. In low light, like the third and fourth images, it gets pretty dramatic.
Select the spheres, and set the emission color to whatever you like. For this character, I set it to pure red. Set the luminance to 1000000. Yes, ONE MILLION! As you can see, the effect changes based on how much light is in the scene. I did nothing to the character's texture settings other than changing the opacity of the irises, and even in the first image, you can see that it doesn't make a noticeable difference in her appearance. All of these scenes were identical, except for lighting. In the first image, the spheres were turned off. In two through four, they were on, set at a luminance of 1000000. The only difference was the lighting.
Let me introduce you to Kestrel. She's one of my favorite custom characters. She's a demon girl that can appear as a human while she wears her enchanted necklace, given to her by her mother. Her specialty is inducing sleep paralysis, and feeding on the fear that you feel while you're awake, but can't move. Hey...we've all been there. A kestrel is a bird of prey that hovers over it's target, waiting to feed, so she is named after that. Kessie perches high in your room at night, watching you. When you're scared, and can't move...that gives her more power. If you could look up, you'd see her eyes glowing in the dark.
If you would like, I can post images of Kessie in her demon form, along with her bestie Feleen. They're both absolutely gorgeous, and some of my favorite custom characters. Please tell me what you think of this effect. I share it with you because you are my people! Hopefully you can use this. It works even with a base G8F or G3F or whatever figure you like.
matt attached the following image(s):