Making cartoony "pixar" or "disney" eyes with that shine in the IRIS.

[devailo]

Hi guys, im really struggling here. I want to reproduce the shine in the eyes of cartoon characters we've seen so many times. I will post references and my results so far.. please help .

[^Lele^]

Ensure the cornea shader is not set to "Affect Shadows", so that at least GI caustics will show up.
Anything more, you'll need proper caustics, which at the moment are only photon mapped.
They'll work just fine for an eye, you'll just need some care in setting them up.

I prepped a simple scene with the rough shapes of a bulb (fast sss2, whole milk preset) and a cornea (set up as described above)
Below, the first image has "affect shadows" active, the second has it off.

[devailo]

You have no idea how precious that advice was. I've been trying for a long time to do this, and gave up and tried again and gave up again and now it will happen. I need to fine tune it a bit. I will show you what i had just before your post and how it went with disabling affect shadows. Just a couple of more tweaks and it will be done.

The left one is the newest one with disabled affect shadows - the eyes got a little darker. The sclera got darker - why ? Also i have tried to fake this by putting strong lights which affect only the inner eye and a specular of 0.55 for the irises with a liiitle bit of brownish in it. Was getting close to the desired effect, but when i disabled the affect shadows and the eyes became much more alive in my opinion. So what do i do with the specular now? Also i had to make those lights affect the cornea in order to get the caustic. What is standart now? They are obviously too big the lights, I will scale them down, Should each eye have its own light? or one for both but further? Thanks a million!

Removing the specular - removes the highlight at all , so maybe im not doing something right, The eyes got a better color now but i dont have that caustic. Do i need to enable caustics now or something? Also the iris goes in by an angle, could that be the reason?

also the light is with affect specular only. Is this right ?