Creating lifelike animated characters is hard. The bounce of the hair, the twitch of the cheek. Disney and its competitors have been continuously working to build more and more realistic animations. They were praised for how lifelike Merida’s hair was in Brave, and how believable Finding Nemo's reef was (aside from the talking fish). Next, they might be lauded for how personable Woody’s eyes are in Toy Story 4. No more ovals with dots in the middle in this studio.

A recently released paper and accompanying video from Disney Studios shows how they’ve been working at modeling eyes. “Even though the human eye is one of the central features of individual appearance, its shape has so far been mostly approximated in our community with gross simplifications,” the authors write.

Here’s the video:

The narrator points out that each eye is unique, and describes a photographic capture system that looked at nine different eyes and recreated each individual’s peepers. The result is realistic, with veins, lumpy sections on the cornea, and the pits and grooves that define a person’s colored iris. They even take into account how reflective each section of the eye is, so as it shifts the reflections within the eye change too. The capture method and reconstruction can even keep track of how the iris deforms as the pupil dilates.