hey it's adam from tested i'm at weta and we love coming down here and covering the ways in which
this amazing shop is always trying to improve its processes and one of the things you might
not know is that one of the oldest most common and yet most difficult things to replicate in
special effects and in movies is the human eye and weta has had techniques that it's developed over
the years but they're always looking towards the future and in looking towards the future
they're bringing in some of the most cutting edge technology imaginable let's take a look
hello richard hello tor uh now eyes are something that are like perhaps one of the oldest things in
special effects and one of the most common and also one of the most difficult and there are a
million different ways to do them but you guys have spent so many months and months and months
doing this development why is it worth all this trouble for 3d printed eyes well we've been doing
eyes traditionally painting them casting them in resins encapsulating them like everyone does
around the world and they've got pretty good we're pretty proud of what we've achieved and there's a
very high water mark created by major effect shops around the world but eyes are so critical to get
right if you want a character to feel right and as we've got more and more into museum and exhibition
work it's become imperative that the eyes are absolutely spot on and that's required as pushing
into new avenues of eye development one of the challenges when you paint an eye no matter how
careful you are about the multiple layers of encapsulant you can't give the illusion of the uh
the veins passing in in and out of the substrate of the white of the eye you can't really achieve
the sense that the limbus line which is the line between the iris and the white actually is
a product that sits into the thickness of the eye it's not just floating on the top like airbrushing
which is how we want to do it so we've had to turn to a 3d uh printing solution that's thankfully led
us to tour tour is uh came to us through a uh thing that we do with the future thinking course
at victoria university under the watchful eye of ross stevens and we do summer internships uh
for young graduates from that course and tour by chance had been working on the stratus 750 machine
which has an extraordinary ability to manipulate pixel by pixel uh translucency to opaque materials
tall can explain that far better than i can can you walk me through the process yeah so with the
j750 there's usually two different kinds of ways to manipulate um and create prints and that's um
quite limited when it comes to making eyeballs you can't get gradients um of any kind of material and
that's what you really need here is different varying translucencies and to have a lot of um
like micro control in detail so um i've used this third method called voxel printing
which is where and a voxel is a three-dimensional pixel yeah okay yeah um and in this case it's also
uh the term for like a droplet of material and so the printer has six materials that it can
load up at once um so cmyk and then white and um for these eyes we put in a clear material
and then those can be dotted together to achieve all of these
colors so each of these is made with a combination of clear cmyk and white pigments yeah super tiny
little dots and when you say super tiny like can you is it microns yeah yeah i mean because
the the thing that's that's so astounding is if i may yes sorry oh yeah um is that
like so much of your work there's no uncanny valley the closer i look the more realistic
it looks the more i mean so can you describe to me how you developed the process of figuring out
which gradients and which uh arrangements worked the best yeah well as you can see it definitely
took a little while these are some of my earlier tests here this is the first step i ever made
first one yeah so there's definitely a big jump from that to that um and so the veins look on one
level there's a sharp line here you have the the the wonderful topography and the iris but there's
all these the translucencies haven't been worked out right yeah i can appreciate that at that point
because i've got to make a commitment to the investment in the time right and the machine
time etc but at that point you know that tour is going to be able to do something something special
something super special at that point and that was six months earlier than where we finally got to so
so this is half a year of someone's time full time doing nothing but incremental shifts and every
time you get an eye printed of course you've got to pay for the print of the eye expensive prints
yeah but but we knew at that point it was worth chasing amazing okay so where did you go from here
yeah so i guess a lot of that was sort of an accident like i just thought i better try and
make an eye to see where i can start from um and one thing that i did discover with this
is that all of the colors are very transparent the only material that is opaque is the white
and so there's a lot of balancing that you need to do to be able to get the colors that you want with
white underneath to be able to to get that trace right yeah yeah control how light moves around
totally otherwise it will all just get absorbed in if it's only color all the way through
um and so in these later ones there's sort of a very thin layer of colour and then it
dissipates into a white solid or i think this cross section is a good way to explain it
so that's an early test for these big eyes here um and even here oh look it's been a
little tricky to get the right level but it's almost there i can see that there's like these
little tendrils that create that that that blurred line between the white and the color
this one particularly is brilliant to show how the limbus line on an eyeball
hangs over the top of the iris and you can see in there how she's created this cut back with this
very very pale color hovering in the in the clear of the eye to give the illusion of
the limbus just entrapping the iris you've become um an eyeball anatomicist and then
you become i mean this is like a doctor's level of knowledge about ah about how eyes are constructed
have you consulted ocular surgeons or specialists uh well my uncle is actually an optometrist so he
was really excited to see these um but it was a lot of like googling and looking at
weird pictures of eyes a few dissections and things on the internet to just see
how you can actually um achieve the look of a realistic eye obviously we can't make the anatomy
exactly the same because of the material behavior but in certain cases especially like the limbus
it's best to just go with what nature does and make it fade off by having that geometry actually
taper to a point um and then it sort of dissipates a little bit you can see it's so clearly there
where the uh the iris and the mountain and valley um almost alien landscape is traveling underneath
yeah the limbus and when you turn it side on you can see it very clearly now these don't come out
of the printer polished they come out in a raw form it's it's they're yeah so this um this is
after it's been cleaned with all the support material um and then it looks like this quite
rough um and this is usually how prints will like look when they come out of the printer and that's
it that's fine um but for these we really need to have them as clear as possible and so we'll put
them on a lathe and go through about 10 different grits from like sandpaper down to like a polish
like your palm perhaps yeah yeah yeah um what was the uh what was the biggest hurdle in getting to
your final product was there one sort of like was it that limbus line something that helped sell
that it felt exactly right i think like the limbus was super tricky to get right especially because
people of different ages have different limiters like older people their limbus is sort of a
lot more softer and a little gooier in some cases um and younger people have really sharp
limits um and so that that look is quite hard to get per character depending on what they look like
um and of course like the color itself how it's so transparent is really hard to get your head around
especially in volumetric space and we've been using these characters aged from six years old to
85 years old so it's required tour looking very carefully at the way that the limbus softens but
also the eye begins to cataract over and the white yellows dramatically right and you can see that
that eye there versus you know the yeah these the way that the veins are becoming much more yellowed
and ethnicity defines the color of the white of the eye as well and even the most crisp
clear white eyes it actually isn't white at all right it's actually a sort of baby blue lilac
color that's actually a very good example of the the base color of the white of the eye and
if you get that wrong the eyes pop they look like they are um abnormally bright in the eye socket
um so obviously you've been layering in your institutional knowledge about how to build
these but then also how does weta absorb this institutional knowledge are you chronicling
the knowledge you have about old versus young eyes and the color bases and things like that
um two to a certain point it is such a like learning process though that you you can't really
write down a step-by-step guide on how to make an eye um you sort of have to just experience what
the materials behave like and then apply that per each case um but the the great thing about
these guys is that i've been able to make them procedurally and so i've made one system that i
can put in different colored irises and different vein patterns and then be able to make one eye
so i don't have to start from scratch each time you can see she's even being now working
on creature eyes and lots and lots oh like a joke yeah oh yeah that's cool um there's a funny thing
in our business about the serial skills that we gather that they each of them become like a lens
that we see through the world so do you find yourself looking deeply into everyone's eyes
yeah um a little bit uh less now that i'm just sort of making these for production yeah but
when i was doing all of this research i was definitely like whenever you talk to people i
just speak you can't help but he kept certain people's eyes and on my cell phone i've got
a multitude of photographs of eyes where someone unique or someone with unique eyes yeah has um
walked past or i've sat opposite them or they've come to a meeting yeah and i've asked
permission to photograph their eye which i've then been able to share with tor
as we've tried to find the range of eyes this this when when you take this this uh silicone
circle and put it over the eye it is the most uncanny amazing beautiful isn't it it's
totally yeah this is a great fidget toy i think you should consider selling these in the gift shop
yeah and when you put them behind the skin too it totally changes how the eyes look too so that's
why these are really helpful to be able to check as you're making them eyes whether whether they
actually will look good and then finally these are boxes of successful ones oh my god yeah just
and these are all these are like three scale two and a half 2.4 scale okay these are eight scale
these are human size it's amazing how small the human eye actually is we we think about it as
being a much larger orb in the face because we concentrate on the eyes but once you actually um
uh look at the size of an eye it's surprisingly small i've always heard and i don't know if this
is true that our eyes are just roughly the same size through most of our lives i believe so yes
uh what tour's now starting to play around with is other things that require translucency and
so temptation early start there and you can see the jumping between uh ideas and so on speaking
of that translucency there's a famous shot of my friend lauren peterson sanding the teeth on the
worm that tries to bite the millennium falcon and the real and he's standing there with this weird
horn shaped thing and what did what that horn shape thing is piece of foam that he's dipped
in pva glue and sprinkled carborundum on and it's a sander specifically for adjusting the thickness
of the worms teeth so that they were properly translucent right looking at them from inside out
yes great so the light is part of us to see light through the tip yep yeah well now toward from
it's absolutely uh brilliant isn't it it really is troy thank you so much for taking me on this
journey thank you really do you have a personal favorite of the ones that are here that's like
white whales ah i'd probably say this hazel one just because when you have the two colors in it
um it really helps the the dimensionality of the iris just pop out a little bit more
um and this has also gone into one of my favorite characters in the end as well so you'll see just
quickly one last comment is that the corneal bulge which is also critical because that creates the
magnification and if you don't have the correct corneal bulge you don't get the pop of the iris
in the head so she's also tor's also calculated that into the equation amazing you're you're like
halfway towards being an eye doctor my second job so much thank you right stuff great stuff
i shouldn't have eaten the seafood