Extra Credits : Brad Husband (Lookdev), Tyrel Scott (Rigging), Dragon Model (Pre-built Asset), Jimmy Gill (Animation), Danilo Silveria (Director), Andre Chaves (Comp)

This is a dragon's eye Rnd/Lookdev I made for a recent job that was not used in the final film.

For the first time, I used an unusual workflow to create a realistic eye. I started by building a procedural iris system, but the resulting mesh was too heavy to animate smoothly. To solve this problem, I created a simple system in Houdini that baked the VDB iris into a depth map and reapplied it on the eye mesh as displacement. This worked really well with the Redshift subsurface shader.

I also made another simple system in Houdini to generate the tiny veins on the lid and membrane.