Valve programmer explained how the eyes were created for characters in Half-Life 2
Since almost 20 years ago, Half-Life 2 debut took place, it has noticeably. It is still interesting to play the classic shooter, its plot laid the foundation for subsequent generations, but most importantly – the heroes of the game had unsurpassed eyes.
The developer of the game Joe Wintergreen (Joe Wintergreen) in his blog Dev Scoops said that it is the eyeballs in Half-Life 2 that are the best in business.
"At some point, I tried to make the eyes of my characters beautiful, and there was a gold standard for this (and, perhaps, still remains) Half-Life 2", – Writes Winerrin. He explains that the eyes of the characters are not "rotating bags with many small details, and more or less flat planes with shaders that make them similar to balls".
In order to explain properly how Valve managed to achieve such an effect from the eyes all these years, Wintergrin turned to the developer, who worked just on these eyes, Ken Berdwell. Apparently, three main textures were used for the eyes. One of them was used for "simulations of self -maintenance from the age". The other was used for the rainbow shell. And the third was used to simulate the convexity of the cornea.
After Berdwell and his team received three main textures, it only remained to properly arrange the iris and cornea to " Create the effect of visual contact". According to Birdwell, " All the necessary data for this can be found in any textbook on anatomy eye". Operating to the eyes of the eyes should not "worry", Since our eyes "They rotate slightly when you look around, because the muscles are tied to them, but this is not noticeable to the person".
" In my opinion, an example of this program code still exists in SDK, maybe in HLMV?" – Berdwell said. "I know that in the end all this was replaced by a fashionable shader, which does all this in one pass, but this did not happen in the version for HL2, and the code may still be there".
Dig in the code is already the destiny of Half -Life fans. Recall that the release of Half-Life 2 took place in November 2004. On a PC, and then in the form of a set of Orange Box, the game appeared on PS3 and Xbox 360.