Looking For Help!

Want to Work on Project Jayden aka Chase the Fish!

well I'm looking for a couple of extra hands
If you can 2D animate, 3D animate, do motion graphics, light, composite, model, texture or have any other skill I would like your help on creating Jayden.

if interested, contact me at: whosTonyRamos@gmail.com

The first kickoff/ interest meeting will be Saturday April 16 at 1pm in room 310 in Mongomery hall (backup room 311).


Hope to see you there!

What Pretty Eyes you Have!

So my friend Nha found this pretty cool tutorial about eye shaders and specular.
I'm such a sucker for tutorials and extra bits of knowledge, that I had to try it out.

http://giro3d.blogspot.com/2009/10/eye-shading-and-rigging-video-tutorial.html

So let's take a look at an animated character's eye.
There is light playing on the iris, creating highlights and shadows.
Also lot of animated characters have a bright white highlight, which makes the character appear friendly.
So I want to create something similar!

My Before
a bit dead and boring

 Lets throw is a ramp shader with a Color Input set to "Normalized Brightness"
onto the Iris. Light instantly reflects off of the iris.

 Now lets add a projection of a image of a white dot as the Incandescence of the outer layer of the eyeball.
Using a image with allow us to control the position of the speculator dot, the softness of the dot, and the brightness.

I then began to notice the reflection was way too uniform and looked nothing like an eye should, even styled

so I added a ramped shader as a masking to the shader that controls the light reflection to create stripes of highlights

looks good after a couple more tweaks

Will soon post the rig demo for Jayden and the cool face GUI that controls the expressions and eye speculator ability. 

Dynamics

There will both hair and cloth maya dynamics in the film Jayden.

Jayden's hair is solid geometry skinned to joint chains. the the joint chains is driven by a IK spline but instead of a normal curve I replace it with a curve being influenced by maya hair dynamics. This makes the joint chains just as dynamic which results in the hair behaving as it is.



The hair is not only dynamic but also has a fk setup where handle can directly mold the position of the hair. This is achieved by having 3 joint chains: one dynamic, one fk, and the last is the binded chain. What I did was orient constraint the FK and Dynamic to the bind and created a switch to turn the weight from one or the other off or on. with this switch I can also control how dynamic or static the hair with be from a scale of 1-10.

the same Hair Dynamics were applied to the body and small fins of Betta.



The large tail at the end is controlled with cloth simulation which will be explained later.

Progress Renders (Jayden, Betta)

Betta has some color!
coming soon is the test video of the dynamic animation movement of Betta

Jayden has color added too. 

and her demoing her hair dynamics and cloth will be coming soon!

Poster uno

Meet the Chalk Fish on the early recruiting poster

The Villa and N.Mare

First off, Special thanks to my good friend Mark Jenkins who did the UVs layout for the Villa, Jayden, Betta, and N.Mare


The Coastal Villa
still working with the lighting and textures

The N.Mare Fish

A lurking predictor of the night sky. They lurk in the clouds waiting for wondering prey to float on by.

Storyboard Anamatic

The Anamatic is ready, sorry about the hard to see-ness
the compression makes the video hard to see



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nctLliu5f7E&feature=channel_video_title

Back in Action- Early renders

The Production is well into action, and now it's time to catch the blog up.

Early renders of Jayden
Jayden is a young girl between the age of 9-11.
She is of a Spanish descent and wears a bright orange shirt, teal sash, sandals, and a white tanktop.
She has violet hair with piercing violet eyes and a missing tooth smile,

Betta (the large dream fish) 

The Dream Fish are the carriers of the stars and the bringer of dreams.

They don't swim in the ocean but instead fly across the night sky inbetween the clouds and buildings.

The Orbs they carry appears as shooting stars. 

Concept Art

Meet Jayden (s)

The Fish Kite and Village

Flying Fish

Betta

Nightmare Fish

Color Scripts

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The Synopsis/ Pitch

Dreams are windows in which we can see and discover our passions and talents.

Jayden is a CG Animation film about a young girl that escapes into a fantasia, in which unearths her talent of art and passion for creativity.

Footsteps can be heard approaching, getting louder and louder. 

Jayden is running with a kite though the streets of a small warm Spanish-Influenced village. She is weaving and bobbing around alleys while her fish kite is wildly swimming though the air shortly above her. Then unexpectingly, her foot catches and skids off of a stick of chalk that was laying on the ground. Jayden tumbles to the ground letting go of her kite, which is then picked up by the wind and carried off. 

Jayden is upset and peeved that she lost her kite until she notices the chalk stick at her feet. She picks it up and examines it. Then an ideas sparks across her mind. She gets up and begins to draw across the wall. She draws a fish, just like the kite she lost. She steps back to admire her work, then glances away from it for a second and then back only to be shocked that her drawing is no longer there on that spot of the wall. She freaks out but then suddenly notices that her drawing is still there but on a different spot on the wall. Puzzled, she walks down towards it, but as she reaches it the drawing springs to life and begins swimming down the alley wall.

She runs after it.

As she runs, the world around her and the drawing begin to vanish. The once tan warm wall in the back has become dark purple, and the ground and wall planes have become one. It looks as if jayden is running in nothingness. the fish quickly swims off frame and then Jayden notices the change in scenery. Because of the lack of a floor plane, she begins to fall. But she is then caught by something. she looks down at her savior to see that it is a giant flying fish.

The fish flys out from behind a cloud to revel an abstract city of shapes and colors in a nightime sky. Jayden is dazzled by the sight of it all. In the distance, there is more giant fish, each carrying a glowing orbs, they all look like shooting stars. The giant fish that Jayden is riding upon continues skimming across the clouds. 

Jayden and the fish begin to come closer to a large cloud formation, but then all of the sudden a bigger angler-like fish springs from the cloud mass. His razor mouth gapes towards them and Jayden slams her eyes shuts and screams. The camera zooms close unto her shut eyes. The scream fades away. The background fades away. All is quiet and still. Then there is a loud snapping sound. Jayden's eyes pop open. 

Jayden is in the village again. Her arm is outstretched to the wall. she pulls it away and open her hand to reveal a broken small piece of chalk. she looks back to the wall, the whole wall is covered in chalk. Drawings of her adventure. The fish, the orbs, the clouds, the city- it's all there. She looks down again sadly at the remains of her new toy. but then relies. It wasn't the chalk that was so fun, it was her imagination and her new found talent to draw. Jayden similes, And then runs off.  

The footsteps fade away.