Adding depth and realism to the eyeballs

The eyes that we made in the previous sections of this chapter have been simplified to work around the limitations of the 3D Viewport and MatCap settings. But it is possible to create much more realistic eyes instead.

To accurately represent the depth of a real eye, we need to model two parts of the eye: an inner part that has an iris and a pupil carved into the surface, as well as an outer part of the eye that represents the cornea.

This outer part poses a problem: it requires transparency and refraction in order to correctly display the inner part through its surface. However, our current 3D Viewport settings can't handle transparency and refraction, so we need to learn a little bit about materials and rendering.

We took a very brief look at rendering in the Exploring the viewport shading modes section of Chapter 1, Exploring Blender's User Interface for Sculpting. For our purposes in this chapter, the Material Preview shading...