Few Shader Questions

[ArtistX1]

Yes, yes I know, but I am not that smart when it comes to shaders

If I used the V4 Elite Texture: Amy (which I normally do 99% of the time) her eyes always come out as black, I have twiddled knobs and slid sliders, but what ever I try doesn't work, I am sure I have seen this posted before, but either I was mistaken or my search skills blow!

Other question I have is, which options do I need to tweak to get an item looking shiny? I tried to use a few of the leather and one latex shader from the DB but they don't seem to be as reflective as they should, could someone out there help a silly fool like myself? :p

[dustrider]

I'm not sure which part of the eye is coming out black. If it's the whole eye you need to adjust the "EyeSurface" - using either Architectural Glass or a simple flat water shader from the LiveDB is a good starting point. If the black is over the Iris, then you will need to edit the Cornea material. You could either make it fully transparent, or use the same shader as the EyeSurface has.

To increase how shiny something looks, it you are using a glossy material, in general increasing the specular value will help (if it's a color, just change it to "grayscale color" and you'll get a slider, 1 will be very shiny, 0 will have no shine), if increasing the specular value doesn't help, then your bump map values may need to be reduced a lot. If you are using a diffuse material increasing the index will increase the shine/reflective properties.

Hope this helps!

[ArtistX1]

Tried the glass and water shader suggestion on both the surface and Cornea and still they turn up black, if the transparency idea doesn't work do you have any other suggestions?

[dustrider]

Attached are images that show the settings for both the EyeSurface and the Cornea, as well as the resulting render. Don't look at anything but the eyes - the rest needs a lot of work (note: the eyes don't have burned in reflections). For the EyeSurface I used the Lead Crystal Glass shader from the LiveDB, then made a slight adjustment to opacity. For the the cornea I just made sure opacity was gayscale color set to 0.000. The image was rendered using Path Tracing.

One important note is when using spectral materials (like the Lead Crystal Glass) you should use Path Tracing or PMC for best results. In this instance, the default Direct Lighting will result in the eyes being noticeably darker.

Hope this helps!

[ArtistX1]

Thanks, will try them on another image, was getting angry not being able to finish the image I was working on, so went with a skin for poser and tweaked it for Carrara