I use this for the picture texture to get the eye color. It was drawn in a paint program. Since the picture will be mapped onto a sphere, it'll be easier to manipulate the eyeball later if the pupil and iris are centered in the picture.

With the same paint program and based on the same image, create a greyscale image to use as the alpha channel. I found it easiest to think about making the parts I wanted to glow white and the parts that should stay dim black, but as it turns out I had to invert the alpha when I imported it.

Create a sphere. Go into the Material Lab. Start with the default material. Click in the A column for Diffuse, Ambient, Transparent (color) and Transparency. Leave the Transparency slider set to zero. Tell the A component that its source is a picture.

Go into the Texture Source Editor and load the color version in the first box and the alpha channel in the second box. You'll know if you have to invert the alpha channel if the result in the third box is mostly transparent.

Exit back to the Material Lab. Use 'object front' for the texture mapping. This will let you easily rotate the eyeball to look in a particular direction.

Play with Specularity and/or Reflection to give the eye that glistening highlight.

Exit the Material Lab and put a little radial light inside the sphere with the eye-picture texture on it. You may want to group the light and the eye sphere to make sure they don't get separated as you work.

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