The illusion of life

I'm working on some of the strange, peripheral parts of my knight model at the moment. This chain of screenshots shows the progression: after my last post, I resized my character's eyes slightly before creating an alpha map for her eyelashes.

Then, I did some experimenting over how to give her some eyes that had life in them. I'm aware that some game engines have very clever tricks with shaders to create an illusion of depth using a simple sphere for the eye, but after a search I could find an easy way to replicate such an effect with the simple scanline rendering I'm using for this. In the second screenshot, you can see me weighing up the advantages of making the mesh for the eyes more complex: the eyes at the bottom are simple spheres with a material and texture, but the eyes at the top are two spheres. The "eye" sphere uses the same map as the bottom eyes but has had the iris area flattened out, while the "gloss/lens" sphere is still perfectly spherical. It's got a simple thin-wall refraction material on it to simulate some level of depth. Looking at these tests (particularly when looking at an angle), I decided that adding the extra polys was worth it. There is something about the upper eyes that just look more lifelike.

The third screenshot shows my progress on creating a simple normal map for the inner mouth (it will eventually be added to th face map, where there is dead space I'm not using). I'm still in the process of creating this.