My 3D World... one of them.

So, I thought I'd start a thread about the new world I'm designing as a first real art project using 3D art beyond modding games.

I am quite the noob when it comes to 3D art--aside from some tweaking of some Bethesda game related stuff in Blender and NifSkope, I have practically no experience before switching to DAZ3D something like two weeks ago.

So here's a brief rehash plus a little back story of what I already covered on this project in the Custom Character Workshop and Render Thread.

This project is based on a somewhat crazy series of dreams I had a few years (less than a decade, I think?) ago. The dream involved a subterranean (living in a cave system, not really "hollow Earth" grade crazy) nation of hyper-advanced former humans who used a bio-technology coupled with a weird, almost magic-like energy system.

They would develop as most humans do up to a certain point, but then get "activated"--merged on a genetic level with a semi-sentient biomechanism that would enable them to bend space and (to a much lesser degree) time (as well as some other dimensions; it was a dream, so I won't get too far into its pseudophysics). The result was no longer fully human, virtually invulnerable as long as they had any molecular mass their biomechanisms could convert to fix them, capable of shapeshifting (using the converted mass), etc.

In particular, when venturing onto the surface (only the still curious and adventurous younger members of that nation formed the scouting parties), they modified their eyes to serve their purposes better.

Normally, their eyes looked almost human, except for being more reflective and sort of metallic looking. When scouting, in both day light and at night time, their eyes became black--although for different reasons.

In daylight, their eyes were black and reflective, filtering and reflecting the light via a photochemical reaction of some component they generated in their sclera, iris, and cornea. Kinda like transition lenses with anti-glare, except stronger (they live in caves after all).

In a low light environment, their sclera would become black and glassy to absorb and let in more light, their iris would become black to absorb more light, their pupils would dilate and enlarge into a vertical, more cat like appearance. There was also a crystalline layer beneath their retina that reflected more light into it, greatly enhancing their night vision (kinda like a cat's... or a shark's). The result was, their night eyes were glassy black except for the pupil, which would appear to glow if it reflected light.

They could rapidly switch between night and day mode on demand (so the transition chemical worked well, I guess).

This is the effect I am currently trying to replicate.

Setting the sclera to a glossy metalic black is easy enough, but making the pupil appear to reflect and glow yet remain almost black is proving to be a challenge.

So far I tried:

- setting pupil to less than 100% opacity, full reflection (white), full ambient light (dark yellow), full specular (dark yellow) with low glossiness, dark yellow diffuse
> I can barely see any result--and even that on only one of my monitors (see attached)
- setting pupil to various degrees of transparency with a spherical arealight behind it.
> comes out black on my renders. If I crank up the light intensity, the skin has a weird yellow glow on it, but the eyes are still pitch black.

Any ideas on how this effect could be accomplished?

Thanx