Once again, I have to say I'm blown away by the quality of the work accomplished by the developers of the CryEngine3. I thought they had already placed the bar insanely high with Crysis 1, but man...
So I've been playing with exporting stuff from Maya to Sandbox 3, learning (sometimes the hard way) how things have to be done, using my old Atreyu model. The conversion from CryEngine2 to CryEngine3 is not that straight forward, due in part to the different ways materials react to the light. Note that the skin shader is much improved in Sandbox3 and the SSS does wonders.
(The model lacks a proper specular map, the diffuse map is too fuzzy/imprecise and the hair has do be redone entirely, but you get the idea...)
There's really no need anymore for shadow decal maps for flesh parts, since anything from hair to cloth (however minute) does cast an actual shadow on the mesh, with even ways to control the harshness of said self-cast shadows.
I struggled a bit with the eyes shader, which is now done without separate iris geometry it seems (which is replaced with a smart attribute allowing you to make the iris look like it recesses due to refraction).
Anyway, congrats to everyone involved in the technical side at Crytek, you've managed to outdo yourselves again!
what we do with the characters usually is get the eyeballs as seperate objects attached as skin attachments to eye bones. try make some animations and show your character in action!
