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 even started adding them 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 may not be anywhere near physically correct, but you can usually
get away with when animating in 2d.
Attack On Titan eye highlights
Also do note, since a highlight is just a reflection of a light, it
should follow the rules of reflectivity. So remember, always make sure
the highlight appears on the same side in each eye in screen space. A
common mistake I've seen is
to paint a highlight, then mirror the eye, but not keep the highlight
on the same side.
So avoid this, that looks unnatural...
And instead make sure it looks like this...
Eye Highlights in 3D
When making a 3d film, even if it's highly stylized, you
want the eye highlights to follow at least some basic physics,
otherwise it will look wrong. This is usually achieved by making your
eyes reflective, and then placing a light right near the eyes to
produce the highlight.
The issue is that in order to more carefully place the eye highlights
to a pleasing spot in the eye, you'd 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 is there a way to have more control over 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 a light
source in your scene that only appears as specular reflections in
the eyes. 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.
Software Agnostic Setup
The basic ingredients are as follows:
Eye Shading: High Specular Value, high IOR, low roughness
Light Placement: in front of eyes near any existing keylight
Potentially parent light to the character
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.
2) Along with the current scene lighting, add an area light to the
scene and place near the eyes. Please note, while having a separate eye
highlight light allows you more flexibility in placing the highlight,
don't let this special light wander too far away from another light in
your environment that justifies the highlight, or else it might start
to look unnatural.
3) For the most realism, leave the light in your scene, but if you want
to make sure the light is always in the eyes, parent the light to the
character's body root node, so when the character moves in the scene
the light will come with it.
4) Select the 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.
5) Finally, lets make sure the light only affects the eyes. Go to the
"Shading" area of the 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
Reflectuion Value (white) with very high Glossiness and an ior of
approx. 1.6. This makes the eye material very
reflective.
2) Along with the current scene lighting, add an area light to the
scene and place near the eyes. Please note, while having a separate eye
highlight light allows you more flexibility in placing the highlight,
don't let this special light wander too far away from another light in
your environment that justifies the highlight, or else it might start
to look unnatural.
3) For the most realism, leave the light in your scene, but if you want
to make sure the light is always in the eyes, parent the light to the
character's body root node, so when the character moves in the scene
the light will come with it.
4) Select the light, go to the Options rollout, and Uncheck "Affect
Diffuse". This will make this
light only
affect the Specular Reflection of the eyeballs.
5) Finally, lets make sure the light only affects the eyes. Go to the
"Options" dropdown of your 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.
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.
