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omelettetaste · 3 days ago

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The Complete Guide to Eye Colour In Resident Evil 8

Alright. I've cracked open the game files to extract every eye-related asset I could find. I've installed a bunch of mods to let me remove face coverings and zoom all the way in on the RE8 model viewer. Let's settle this one once and for all!

The short version, for those who just want a cheat sheet:

Ethan Winters: Hazel

Miranda & the Four Lords: Various greys

Bela, Cassandra and Daniela: Yellow

Mia, Rose, Chris and the Duke: Blue

Every local villager: Blue

Most of these are, of course, open to some interpretation, even beyond the usual scope for debating the exact line between grey and blue, etc. Does the eye colour on Ethan's model even count as canon, when you never see it in game? Does Donna's, when her eyes are either hidden behind a veil or vanishing as the light fades from them? It's up to you. But have some longer notes below.

Ethan

For Ethan, I could not get a good shot of his in-game model even with mods, so the render comes from Noesis (a tool for viewing game assets). His eyes are a sorta dark-blue-brown, which I think I can safely class as 'hazel' under the standard definition of "kinda brown, but not, like, brown-brown".

Unsurprisingly, the texture for Ethan's eyes has barely changed from the one in RE7 (lower resolution, and with a larger pupil than most in RE8) ‒ because why update what won't even be seen? But they're still distinctly different from every other character in either game, so I like to see hazel-eyed-Ethan as the official version myself.

Miranda and the Four Lords

Genetically unrelated though they may all be, Miranda and her four "children" all have some variant of washed-out-blue-grey-eyes ‒ even Moreau, who has the least human-looking eyes in the family. Is the mould a factor? (Insert your own theories here!)

Donna's eyes look brown in her portrait, and I would not blame anyone for taking that as more definitive than her character model. But the portrait is dark and fairly low-resolution, and her eyes are very pale in death, so I'd still tend towards the grey-blue of the model myself.

For such different characters, Dimitrescu and Heisenberg's very-pale-grey eyes are remarkably similar. Even Donna's are arguably just a darkened version of the same colouration, and all three have areas of orange-brown discolouration near their pupils.

Apparently this counts as a form of heterochromia ("central heterochromia"), which gets some people very excited. Realistically though, this particular form of heterochromia is so common that you probably don't even notice it most of the time (pick an eye colour, plug it into google image search, and I guarantee you will find examples without even looking for them).

The same central-orange-brown-region is also present for Mia, baby Rose, and Ethan ‒ you can even see a traces of the same in the Baker family (though not Miranda herself). And it's tempting to start to theorise that blue/grey-eyes-with-brown-centres are a symptom of mould-infection ‒ but then, two of the five members of Chris' team have it too, as well as some of the villagers. It's not there for every blue-eyed character in this game, but it's probably just one of Capcom's standard ways of adding a little realistic variation to eye textures.

All that said, Heisenberg, Dimitrescu and Miranda's eyes are so pale that they look just a little bit unnatural, and I'd be very surprised if that wasn't deliberate.

As for mutated forms, Heisenberg is the only one whose monster-form maintains his original eyes ‒ though they're darknened by a heavy pink overlay, which looks even more extreme to me in his game model than it does in the asset, so there's probably another layer of filters on top of it.

Dimitrescu and Moreau just get pupil-less white eyes in their own monster forms (though Moreau certainly gets plenty of other monster-eyes elsewhere on his body). And Miranda gets just one weird eye in the middle of her forehead, for whatever reason. Other monsters in this game have all manner of different eyes, probably just whatever the designer thought looked cool ‒ there's no one, consistent mould-infection-standard, just an awful lot of bizarre individual variation.

Bela, Cassandra and Daniella

All have unnatural yellow eyes, which I think we can take as a cadou-fly-people trait. Their eyes are so consistent they all seem to use the same eye-texture-asset between the three of them, so I haven't bothered including it three times.

There's also one official render of Lady Dimitrescu which gives her almost-glowing yellow eyes, though there's a yellow tint to all the light in the picture, so it may just be reflecting ambient lighting. Still, if you want to theorise she can make her eyes do that, that pic's arguably as canon as anything else.

Rosemary Winters

Rose's eyes seem to change a little between her baby stage and her teen years, losing those brown centres, though they're still a similar blue otherwise. The much stranger thing is that both baby and teen Rose's models have two slightly different extra red eye textures included alongside the standard blue ones, and I could not tell you what they're for.

Possibly there's some way of superimposing the red over the blue base to create the glowing-white-eyes you see when she uses her powers. But that doesn't happen until the DLC (which has even more confusing eye textures which might work for this purposes), and never to baby Rose, so I'm not entirely convinced. Were Rose's eyes supposed to flash red at some point in development? I have no idea.

Mia and Chris

Get grouped together because both appeared in RE7, where their models had brown eyes instead of blue. This makes more sense for Chris, whose model was completely redesigned for RE8, but what's going on with Mia? Her eyes are the same colour before and after she's infected in RE7, and her eyes only get even more brown when she's being mind-controlled, so I don't think we can blame the mould. I'm going to have to assume Capcom just changed them when they reworked her model for RE8 (which has changed, if not nearly so much as Chris') and didn't notice, or didn't expect anyone in the audience would.

I could not actually find any textures for Chris' eyes in the RE7 files, probably because he only shows his face in cutscenes stored in video format, but here's a close-up pic anyway.

The Villagers (and the Duke)

There are 8 named villager characters in the village files, but only five different eye textures to share between them ‒ and two of those are just lightly-adjusted variants on one of the first three. Luiza's model doesn't even have textures for her eyes ‒ I assume her model just references eyes from one of the first five.

Below in order are Elena, Leonardo, Roxana (the other woman at Luiza's), Griggori (man with the gun who Ethan meets first), and finally, the common texture used by Anton, Iulian, Sebastian, and even the Duke. Maybe we can blame inbreeding.

I doubt there's any important buried lore to be found in the fact the Duke has the same eyes as half the village, it's probably just a texture the developers liked using for characters whose eyes would never have to be seen up close.

Chris' Team

Yet more pseudo-canonical eyes, never actually seen in game. But they do all have detailed face models (you can reveal them with mods), probably because there were plans to give them bigger roles earlier in development. Their eye textures are an a different format to the usual, possibly because their models are invisible and incomplete, but they do match what that mod reveals.

The team are notable mostly for containing some of the very few white-skinned but brown-eyed characters in the game (the mother and daughter on the bus from Rose's epilogue are the only others) ‒ though the team isn't all white anyway.

And having now spent way too long digging into this subject, I'm not totally sure Capcom is aware that green eyes are a thing that a) exist, and b) can be as common as blue in some parts of Europe, because Eveline is the only person in this game with green eyes, and she's just a hallucination.