Gaming

And after fiddling with the colour of the sclera for ages, it turns out that the eyes look brighter once you click on the character in racemenu, for some reason.
So now I have to decide if I think they are too bright anyway. Presumably the mod textures also look dark initially and then brighter. Though it doesn't make sense at all that the iris look the right colour straight off the bat, when the sclera doesn't...

Skyrim is weird that way.

Why do they need so many versions of some eye colours? I don't get how people manage to add several more colours... Though heterochromia could be fun of course (but I'm not sure it's possible unless one simply replaces the blind eye texture with a coloured one...)

Anyway, there are three blue and two grey colours, and one green but also three hazel (green hazel, hazel and brown hazel) and then there are yellow, amber and brown. While hazel and amber are arguably versions of brown, it seems odd that there's like "one proper brown" but two grey (which I think is really THE rarest colour). And yellow is just a lighter amber, not sure why they'd need two of that either as it's also rather rare...
Anyway I guess I'm fairly happy with the ones I've done so far, though I still have a few to go... (Not bothering with the blind eye or the drunken/bloodshot eyes I think)

And uhm... looking through the eye textures, there are no "greenhazel" textures. I wonder why the eye exists in the racemenu menu...

Also, no wonder dark elf eyes are boring. You can choose between red, redder and pinkish red (plus purple). For high elves you can choose between green, green and yellow, although they are named green, yellow and orange.

I also read up on sclera colours and apparently, if an animal is social, it will usually have high contrast between sclera and iris (so white sclera, darker/more colourful iris or dark sclera and pale eyes) while if they're more solitary and don't want others to be able to read their eye movements they'll have dark sclera and dark eyes... And I'm guessing all the playable races should be considered social, so... even if some mers have dark sclera, they should then have pale eyes instead.

Guess I have something to do tomorrow, as well...

Oooh I think I have found how I can make heterochromic eyes. Though it'll have to wait... And I still haven't found where those extra pair of hazel eyes come from but just as well - it just means one less texture for me to make.

Edit: And just because I said that, I found it. It looks like it's a heterochromic version for males (1 brown + 1 green eyes) which in females are either missing the brown eye or just not meant to be heterochromic and uses the green eye texture for both eyes.

Edit2: Apparently Lydia is one user, and Tolfdir is one. I never noticed he had different coloured eyes. I guess that just shows how unnecessary it really is to mod some things....

I wonder if the bright eye thing is something to do with the AO shader?

I remember when playing Starfield the eyes would sometimes look freakishly bright if the character was at a certain angle to the light and after looking into it I found out that they'd neglected some of the AO maps and modders had to fix it later in that Bethesda way.

EDIT: Forget that idea. Skyrim doesn't have AO maps.

No it's more of a "over a certain brightness it goes very bright and under a certain level it goes very dark and in that small stretch in between where everything looks more or less the same to the human eye, is where all the colours come out right in game".

It's like when you try to find the right temperature of water in the shower. Too hot, too cold, but if you manage to turn the knob like 0.1 degrees, it's just right.

It just works 

Yes, Todd. Sort of.

It works... just 

...and sometimes not.

Speaking of turning things 0.1 degrees, that's how you get things like mannequin activators to work...

A comparison of the original dark elf eyes and mine (I also added a blue colour but I have to make it a textureset and a playable headpart and if I want any NPCs to use it I have to decide which ones). I haven't seen the result in game, yet, but it looks OK in the CK. The sclera might be a tad dark even though they're not as dark as before... I think brightness is affected by both actual brightness and saturation, so maybe I need to make the sclera more saturated? It's still hard to actually see the eyes, more than as a glint of the eye colour...