Soulburn Studios Art Lessons

Eye Highlights In Animation
By Neil Blevins
Created On: July 17th 2025
Software: Blender or 3dsmax (vray)

When making characters, one of the most important elements are the eyes. Many would say they are the window to the soul. While there are several aspects that give life to the eyes of a character, one important element are eye highlights, which are the white circles you may have seen in the eyes of 2d cartoon characters. But what makes a good 2d eye highlight doesn't necessarily translate well to 3d, so this lesson will go into what these highlights are, and how to best replicate them in 3d animation.

Use of eye highlights in Princess Mononoke by Studio Ghibli

Eye Highlights in Real Life

Highlights are actually specular reflections of bright light sources. So "Eye Highlights" are just bright reflections in the eyes of a light in your environment. For example, notice the two white dots in each of these eyes...

These are actually just reflections of two light bulbs that are in the room near the camera. And the two bulbs each reflect in each eye, creating 4 white dots. If instead of a round light bulb, the object being reflected was say a florescent light, the highlight in the eye would be a long rectangle instead of a circle. Learn more about reflections and highlights in this lesson: Specular Reflections.

Eye Highlights in 2D

Based on the real world, artists started adding stylized highlights into their drawings and 2d animations. They were so effective people started adding them even when there was nothing in the environment to justify them.

Anime does this a lot, for example, in this screengrab from Attack On Titan, notice the window is behind the character, and the window is really bright, and so is likely to produce an eye highlight if the character were facing the window. But instead they are facing away from the window, and yet still have strong eye highlights. This is a cheat that is not physically correct, but in cases of stylized 2d animation, you can frequently get away with it without distracting the audience.

Attack On Titan eye highlights

Eye Highlights in 3D

That 2d cheat is harder to get away with in 3d. Even if stylized, a 3d film needs to more closely follow real physics. But don't fear, there's still a little leeway to make something believable but more artistically controllable.

In the ideal world, you achieve an eye highlight in 3d by making your eyes reflective, and then placing a light pointed at the eyes to produce the highlight. But this does limit you potentially, since to place the eye highlights to a pleasing spot in the eye, you may have to change the main lighting in the scene. And this can be not only difficult, but could potentially ruin the lighting on other parts of the character or on the environment. So how do we control our eye highlight placement without having to move the rest of the scene lighting?

For this, we take an old trick from live action films, and have an additional light source in your scene that only appears as specular reflections in the eyes, and doesn't illuminate the scene otherwise. That way, no matter what the scene lighting is doing, you can always add that little highlight to the character's eyes to make them feel more alive.

Lets give more details on how to do this in 3d software.

Software Agnostic Setup

The basic ingredients are as follows:

Eye Shading: High Specular Value, high IOR, low roughness
Light Placement: pointed at eyes from direction of any existing keylight, 2-3 times further than the camera.
Make light Spec only, no diffuse
Have light only affect the eyes, no other scene objects

Blender Example

1) Give the eye's material a high specularity with very little roughness and an ior of approx. 1.5. This makes the eye material very reflective. Note: If doing this causes the environment to become too prominent in the reflection, then reduce the IOR or IOR Level a bit and increase the intensity of the Eye Light so that the highlight it produces is still bright but the scene reflections are less intense.

2) Along with the current scene lighting, add an area light to the scene and point it towards the eyes (The Eye Light). Play with distance of the light to the eyeballs to get a good placement, I tend to find the light needs to be 2-3 times further than the camera. Adjust the size and brightness of the light to get the highlight shape and intensity you're after.

3) Select the eye light, go to the object properties tab, and under ray visibility, uncheck everything except "Glossy". This will make this light only affect the Specular Reflection of the eyeballs.

4) Finally, lets make sure the light only affects the eyes. Go to the "Shading" area of the eye light's "Object Properties" tab, go to Light Linking, click "New", and drag your two eyeballs from the Outliner into the Light Linking List. Now the spec only eye highlight light will only affect the eye objects and nothing else in your scene.

3dsmax (vray) Example

1) I start with a VrayMtl. Give the eye's material a Reflection Value (white) with very high Glossiness and an ior of approx. 1.6. This makes the eye material very reflective. Note: If doing this causes the environment to become too prominent in the reflection, then reduce the IOR or Reflection Value a bit and increase the intensity of the Eye Light so that the highlight it produces is still bright but the scene reflections are less intense.

3) Select the eye light, go to the Options rollout, and Uncheck "Affect Diffuse". This will make this light only affect the Specular Reflection of the eyeballs.

4) Finally, lets make sure the light only affects the eyes. Go to the "Options" dropdown of your eye light, click the "Exclude" button, change the mode to "Include" and then add your two eyes to the list. Now the spec only eye highlight light will only affect the eye objects and nothing else in your scene.

Eye Highlight Placement in 3D and 2D

So one big note, the flexibility of adding a special light to create eye highlights in your scene comes at a cost, which is your scene can look totally broken if you're not careful with the placement. To keep the placement looking believable, try and keep the highlight pointing towards the keylight in your scene. Basically, while we don't need to have a scene light produce the highlight, we do want it to appear that a scene light COULD have created the highlight. So for example, say you have a Keylight in the upper left of your frame, move your eye highlight light so that the highlight it produces is in the upper left of the eye. Same thing applies to a 2D scene, whatever part of the frame your keylight appears to be in, place your 2d painted highlights in that direction.

While it usually is, it doesn't always have to be the keylight, but any light that makes logical sense. Like if there's a computer screen in your shot, and your character is looking towards it, placing the eye highlight in the same direction as the computer screen also makes sense. Or even place more than 1 highlight light if you have multiple really bright light sources in your scene.

Also note, with a real 3d light source, you're not going to get the highlight placed on each eye in exactly the same spot compared to the pupil / iris. There may even be a moment if you're animating your character where the highlight may appear in one eye but not the other due to the angle of the eyes to the light. And that's ok, it looks more realistic this way.

And finally, if you're making a 2d animation instead of a 3d one, always make sure the highlight appears on the same side in each eye in screen space. A common mistake I've seen in student work in 2d is to paint a highlight, then mirror the eye, but not keep the highlight on the same side.

So avoid this, it looks unnatural...

And instead make sure it looks like this...

Conclusion

So next time the eyes of your character look dull or lifeless, add this special eye highlight, I think you'll see how much it adds to your scene.