learning to cry for fun and profit

Basics: If you're at all familiar with TS3 CC-making, you'll be pretty comfortable here. There's a grayscale texture and a tricolor mask that determines how colors are distributed by the game's color picker. By default, the eye "zones" are the sclera, outer iris, and inner iris, each one controlled by a different color on the tricolor mask. The texture formats are PNG, though, so no worries about fucking around with DDS files and channel layers (which is a relief for me, personally). The texture for the eye is about 150x150px, and it's spherical, so converting eyes from TS2 in particular will be difficult if you don't have a hi-res texture as your starting point. Not impossible, but difficult.

Separate textures: Each eye texture is separate so you can decide whether you want to mirror the texture or have completely different ones per eye, so that's neat! The same goes for the tricolor masks, so if you want to have slightly different coloration in each eye, you can.

Pupil dilation: The Paralives eye mesh reaaaaally stretches out the pupil. I'm not sure off the top of my head how this compares to the TS3 eye mesh, but for TS2 textures at least, you're going to have to shrink the pupil a lot to get it looking how it did in TS2.

Separate highlights: Exactly what it says on the tin. Highlights for the eyes are controlled by a separate resource in game, so you can mix and match them. Other people have already figured out how to make additional custom highlights but that's still above my current skill level. When making your eye texture, you'll want to blend out any preexisting highlights on the texture itself.

Sclera washout: Although you can put textures on the sclera of the eye, it renders weirdly in game. Any texture you put on it turns gray and light textures don't show up. I tried adding a little bit of pink and faint eye veins, but the changes ended up not showing up at all in game. It looked identical to the default sclera. However, some folks have managed to make changes to the sclera with darker texturing like these ones by CodeNekko, but it looks like the texture has to be very dark for it to show up.

Pupil lightening with saturated colors: The way the game renders eye colors, anything at 100 brightness causes the pupils to turn from black to a light gray, even if the actual color of the pupil texture is pure black (#000000). This unfortunately includes very saturated colors that aren't actually light (such as #0000ff) but are expressed with 100 brightness on the color wheel. I did a lot of fucking around trying to mitigate this, but didn't have any luck. It might be possible if there's a way to enable a fourth color channel on eyes to control the pupils separately, but I have no idea how to go about adding additional channels to eyes or if that's even possible.