Sculpting eyes - open or closed?

LEViATHAN

Trying to get into sculpting shit some more. Seen some sculpts with the eyelids closed, and a lot with the lids open. Is there any particular reason for doing them open/closed, or does it just boil down to personal preference? What are the pros and cons?

Neox

its pretty much personal preference, also its a matter of what you want to do, sculpting them open, helps defining the shape and the expression, while it will stretch a lot when you close them, sculpting them closed and opening em just by bones will make it pretty hard to get the expression you want but you'll have stretchfree eyelids when the eyes are closed :P
i prefer open eyes, because most games i work on either don't close the eyes or do it with bones, when they'd use morphtargets i might consider doing them closed, dunno never really did that, just for fun on speedies

Mark Dygert

Does the character have their eyes open or closed most of the time?

Assuming you're doing them open. You can do one of two things I can think of to make the eyelid as near distortion free.

1) As a last step when you're unwrapping do a blink morph/blendshape, unwrap the stretched eyelid, save our your UV layout from the blended version and apply it to the open eye original.

2) Be wise with your loops, your UVs and paint the deforming area with solid color padding it a little bit on both sides by a few pixels.

Mongrelman

I tend to go with a half-closed (or half-open if you are more of an optimist I guess).

I find it easier to model and bake the eyelid geometry like that and there is less stretching when the lids are closed.