Premise - Eye lighting test, Mesh lights and Emission

Today I moved on to another scene from my animatic, this particular shot involves a wall of eyes staring at my character and eventually when it comes to my pre-vis a camera will pan around the placeholder as the eyes emerge. Within this scene the eyes will be emitting light so it's a matter of finding out what kind of materials and lights will help showing this off.

Emission

My first test involved using aiStandardSurface and enabling the emission tab, this gave me an ideal look of how I wanted it however I was told by Alan that emission isn't technically a light and the more eyes I have with emission it will cost me more render time.

Mesh light - without texture

Mesh light - with texture

So, I then moved into changing the polymesh into a light mesh and this did the same job as emission but with additional light settings which was helpful, however this can affect the textures on the sphere too, so this could possibly be sorted with Light-centric linking. There's actually another test I'm yet to try which involves placing a point light in the eye and breaking the Light link with the eye the point light is in, I will show the differences at some point tomorrow along with a diagram of how I want the eyes to emerge out of the wall and actually have eyelids.