Specular highlights, reflections and translucent material

I just cant seem to get any depth to my characters eyes for several reasons.

So I started googling for unreal engine 4 eyes, and I found 1 picture of decent looking eyes. Wich leads me to believe its been photoshopped or something.

The issues im having are:

The wet parts of the outer eye, cornea and tearducts etc look like garbage to be honest. Reflections are anything from bad to not existing.
The specular highlights are really weird, its basically just tiny white dots that look like as if shining on the model with a spotlight that is location kilometers away. And thats the best case scenario, certain settings and there wont be any specular at all.
Refraction settings if following the ior values of 1.43 gives a really strange effect. Basically if you model the cornea covering the eye and set refraction to 1.43 the eyeball will shrink by well… About 43%.
It would be hilarious if people in real life ran around with eyeballs that appeared to be only 1cm in diameter.

But we have bump offset! Wich is a good thing but can hardly compensate for all the other flaws.

Is there any way around these issues? That doesnt revolve around no dynamic lighting.

Try these: Eye Shader – Ella Svahn

[UE4] Warrior Scene Collaboration - Work in Progress - Unreal Engine Forums (Scroll down and you’ll see the eye shader).

Hey thanks for the tips :slight_smile: I remember that last link I was looking at it a while ago, thats good looking eyes.
Whats shown in that shader is the main part of the eye, the thing im confused about is the overlay. Wich I aswell had several attempts at, tried using a light direction to fake the highlights and what not.
But never really got any decent result, and also simply getting a vector from the directional light doesnt care if there are objects in the way or not. So even if it works on a stationary object in a fixed scene, it will look strange when the highlights are identical when the face is in a shaded room or other dark areas :smiley:

I finally got some decent reflections, apparently the diffuse color determines the reflections. So if the diffuse is black (Atleast for me) then the reflections disappear.
I set it up using the advanced lighting level to eliminate anything else ive might have messed up in my level.
Also enhanced the reflections with a simple emissive color wich is controlled by taking the reflection vector dot camera vector. Not sure how that will work in a dark area but you could lower the emissive amount.
However to get those crisp reflections on the layer covering the eye I need a metallic value close to 1 wich darkens the eyeball behind it. So I have to compensate for that somehow.

Is there a way to cause the metallic part to not color the object black? I can feel it will cause issues when the eyeball is closer to white