Living Eyes

Starfield's eyes are painted as chalk

Not a figure of speech. The white of the eye ships with its roughness map set to exactly 1. 0 — the value you would use for chalk — and there is no glossy region anywhere in that map. A wet eyeball with no specular response has no catchlight, and a face with no catchlight reads as dead.

That is the whole problem, and it is a one-value problem.

What this does

The eyes are wet. A proper corneal cap now sits over the pupil and iris — the glassy surface that catches light. The white goes from 1. 000 to 0. 30, drier toward the corners where the tear film thins.

vanilla      now

cornea                    0. 86       0. 10     glassy, gives the catchlight

the white of the eye      1. 000      0. 30     wet

tear / wetness overlay    0. 83       0. 30

Irises have an edge again. A real iris has a dark limbal ring where it meets the white. Starfield's measures 0. 005–0. 129 against a natural 0. 10–0. 25 — and on some colours it is negative, the rim brighter than the iris. Without it the iris dissolves into the sclera through a soft halo. All 11 iris textures get one.

196 new eye colours. 12 becomes 208.

What this deliberately does NOT do

It does not brighten the whites. They measure luminance 0. 629 in vanilla, which sits inside the natural 0. 55–0. 72 range. Brightness was never the defect. Only the yellow cast was pulled back, and gently.

It does not touch the iris fibre detail. Bethesda's stroma painting measures 0. 087–0. 121 against a natural 0. 06–0. 12. The painting was always good — it was the framing that was missing.

Everything above is measured, not guessed. Where vanilla was already right, it was left alone.

Why 196 colours and not 50

Because colour alone cannot give you fifty distinguishable eyes. The iris is one pigment over a blue base — a far narrower range than hair — and a list of fifty flat colours would land dozens of near-identical pairs.

What actually separates real irises is surface structure. So every shade is a colour plus a graded feature profile, taken from a population study of iris surface features and distributed the way that research says these things actually occur:

[]Flecked — pigment spots. A light-iris feature (58% of Europeans, ~17–22% in East and South Asian cohorts), so it only appears on lighter shades.[/]

[*]Ringed — central heterochromia, the amber collarette. The single strongest cue that stops a blue eye reading