Low Poly Arm Tutorial

Here is a two part time lapse video where I build a low-poly arm in Maya. I used Maya and Go Tools for the modeling.

Part 1


Part 2

2009 Figure Drawings

So I finally got around to taking pictures of my figure drawings. Click on the slideshow to go the album for hi-res images.

Some thoughts on workflow...

I'm one of those artists who is rarely satisfied with the tools at my disposal. Even with the advent of ZBrush, Mudbox, Modo, etc., I still find myself wondering why the software designers created the workflow the way they did. Yes, anyone can get very comfortable in any package, but it usually takes years of practive and customization before that happens. It is rare that a piece of software is so straightforward right out of the box.

One of my biggest pet peves (sp?) is a software package that has features that seem to never end, and yet those features are so hard to get to and use, that it almost negates the fact that they are there in the first place. Years ago, I was hired at Avalanche Software in Salt Lake City (I still work for them, but we are now Disney Interactive Salt Lake). We were using a piece of software at the time called Hash's Animation:Master. I had never seen it before. I had been studying at BYU in the animation department, barely making it through creating characters out of NURBS primitives, and hated every second of it (Nurbs, that is). Now I understand that they have been made easier to work with in some packages, but still, back then, it was a total pain. You could not do what you wanted without it being a total paiin. When I began in Animation:Master, I found something different: that the feature set wasn't huge, and the paradigm was different (using b-splines vs. polys or Nurbs), but I found that authoring what I wanted to was an absolute breeze. Things like bones didn't have joint orients. Assigning a mesh to a skeleton was a manual, but an easy and simple process. Rigging was a joy compared to what I was used to. It had almost every tool that I needed to use, and it was EASY to understand and implement all of them. Different, but when easy is the different part, I willing o go for that. I loved it.

They had a dirty little secret: make tools easy to use and understand, and the artists is empowered. Such was the way that you could correct a mesh's deformation when it was animated. Who would have thought - just pose the character, sculpt the mesh, and have the character remember what it looked like at that point! Truly amazing. So simple, yet almost all software packages today that are so much more "robust" fail to realize that. They take pride in how "deep" their feature set is. What I see is painful authoring. Even though I CAN do it, I have to do it an inefficient and difficult way. the result is the same, but I have lost valuable time I could be spending on other things. I have much more important things to to than make corrective blend shapes, influence objects, etc. I want to animate. This is where Hash came in. If more packages would implement things like these two videos I made, artists would go nuts. The power that comes with correct authoring methods cannot be overstated.

The first video shows "Smart Skinning". Move an object, fix anything that needs to be fixed, and it remembers. The second shows how I create a facial animation slider, blending skeletal animation and a corrective shape in one step, and one simple to use interface. Now remember, the tools are pretty rudimentary, but the implementation is genius. No wonder I continue to compare Maya and Softimage to A:M. It was one of the most genius packages ever.






Ahhhh. Those were the days.

ZBrush Mouth Sculpt

Here was a 13 minute sculpt I did in ZBrush. Man, I love sculpting in it, but I still can't STAND the interface. I did a lot of the sculpting with the DamStandard Brush, that you can download from Pixologic's Homeroom website. Here is the direct link. The brush was created by Damien Canderle, whose website is www.maddamart.com.

New and Improved!

So, I made some adjustments that I think make a big difference. Looks more like what I had in mind...a 7 year old kid. Now for the hair...Stay tuned.

New Character Progress

So I started on a new character, and to break out of the mold, I went really cartoony. I need to break out of my box from time to time. After seeing Up, I thought I would give the look a shot. While this is a far cry from it, it's definitely closer than previous stuff. This is all about 2 hours of work. I started from a box and wend from there. I'm not normally a box modeler, but I really wanted a smooth surface that comes from "Catmull-Clarking" a box down. it's actually pretty easy. I would never do it for a complicated character, but for something like this, it worked great. The top montage is just a few morphs that I was experimenting with. This was all done in Modo 302...gotta love Modo!

Mr. SphereHead

Man, it's been too long since I posted. I need to get back on the horse and get some stuff up here. Dave Malan is putting me to shame. I really have loved getting back to more realistic stuff, albeit a little twisted version. I'm really trying to break out of the mold I'm made from - very academic. So the other night I was staring at Mel Milton's blog and got really fired up to go really stylized. This ZBrush head is NOT stylized like I'm talking about, but my next one will be, so stay tuned. And Mel, thanks for the inspiration! Truly amazing stuff!

EDGE LOOPS!!

So Here is another model I did in Silo.  I really liked the tools.  I thought I would do a study of edge loops, so I can really get in the habit of doing them right.  I also made this head as a generic game model so I can push/pull it into any desigh I want.  

Good Edgeloops = Flexibility

First Silo Model

So I'm starting to learn Silo (www.nevercenter.com) and so far I am really liking it.  It just seems that it was MEANT to be a modeler (it was!) whereas other software feels like all the tools are there for modeling, but they are tucked away in some hard to reach place.  

So I modeled a cartoon hand, and thought I would record the process for posterity's sake (or more likely just mine).  Turned out pretty good, but this was an experiment, so there's a lot of mistakes and backtracking in it.  But I like to see that happen in a video so that I can understand what happened, and what went wrong.  Hope you like it.  The first video is 3x and the second is 4x.


Modeling a Cartoon Hand in Silo - Part 1 from Barry Zundel on Vimeo.


Modeling A Cartoon Hand in Silo - Part 2 from Barry Zundel on Vimeo.

Old Game Art

These are a **few** characters from games I was the character lead for - Chicken Little, and Meet the Robinsons.  Old, low-poly characters are always fun to look at..  I did the modeling, UV mapping, and rigging.  Some rough textures too, but in the end, our texturing team did the final paint job.

My Current Demo Reel

So after 8 years of working, I realized that I didn't really have anything to show, because I had never made a demo reel. Most of what I have done for the past 8 years didn't make it, but I used a few personal things and such, and put together a reel. More for myself than anything else. It made me realize that I have a lot to do and a long way to go.

Barry Zundel 2008 Demo Reel from Barry Zundel on Vimeo.

Death Vegas is Live!

Well, it went live a few weeks ago. But I did all the character modeling and rigging. It was a really fun project to work on and especially to work with such great talent as Scott Stoddard, Adam Ford, Ethan Halvorsen, and Melissa Halvorsen. They are a great team with amazing talents and capabilities.

Maya Arm Rigging Tutorials

For my BYU Class, I did some simple rigging tutorials so that they could watch it after I shoe them in class. I made these available on Vimeo, so anyone can watch them. They're pretty simple, since this is a beginning Maya class, but for what it's worth, they may help someone else.

Oh, and by the way, if you join Vimeo (which is free), you can download the original video at the bottom right of the page.

Part 1 - Joints, IK, and Control Objects

Creating an IK Arm in Maya - Part 1 from Barry Zundel on Vimeo.

Part 2 - Forearm Roll Bones

Creating an IK Arm in Maya - Part 2 from Barry Zundel on Vimeo.

Part 3 - Finger and Clavicle Control

Creating an IK Arm in Maya - Part 3 from Barry Zundel on Vimeo.

3D Head...Part 2

So, my first session in ZBrush came out like this...

I think there is a little bit too much in the hair, but it's going well. We'll see what happens next.

New 3D Head - Part 1

I've been working on this a tiny bit here and there for a while now. This is a render of the base mesh. Next step: sculpting. Modeled and rendered in Modo 302.

New Stuff...

So again, it's been way too long since I've posted anything. I need to do this a lot more, as I always say, but here are some "newer" ones. Sitting behind Dave McClellan for this last one doesn't help my confidence much.

Friday Figure

I caught myself a little early this morning. I have the worst way of elongating the torso so that it just doesn't fit, but I think this one turned out better. Not perfect, but better than normal.

The World Has Ended

Well, maybe not. But it could have, because I'm posting a few drawings. These are from this morning's figure drawing session at work. Last weekend, I was going through all of my pads of drawings from college and before, and I as amazed that I have almost completely forgotten most of the good things I learned...the gesture, the construction, line quality. All of those things have slowly ended up in the garbage bin within my head. So I'm trying to get them back. I kind of like the way this drawing turned out. A little heavy on the lines and outlining, but overall, I think it came out pretty good.

Animation:Master Animation DVD Downloads are now available!

I finally got to posting my animation tutorials on my Lulu storefront. All of the character performance videos are now available:

1. Character Performance Introduction - 31 min.
   
2. Keyframing - 52 min.
   
3. Inbetweening - 1 hr. 13 min.
   
4. Finessing the Curves - 58 min.
5. Facial Animation - 50 min.
   
6. Final Rendering - 10 min.
   

They are all 1280x1024 Quicktime h.264 .mov's.

Since my posting privileges have been removed from Hash.com's forum (long story...maybe I'll tell it sometime. Let's just say that I'm an Avalanche guy and Martin Hash doesn't like that), I'm announcing it here. There have been a lot of people emailing me about these, and there will be more coming soon.

10,000 hits!

Well, it's a pretty pitiful accomplishment seeing that most of my Avalanche cohorts have triple or 10x that. But I never thought that many people would see my stuff. I hope it's actually interesting to them, and not one of those...

*Avalanche Blog*...
"Ryan Wood! Sweet!....Adam Ford- Sweet!!! who's this Barry Zundel guy?...(clicks link)...oh...(clicks "back")

Anyways, thanks for the patronage. I've really been struggling to find time to add to my blog lately, so I will try to do better in the future.

Well, not quite a painting, but...

Most of my time for the past 2 months has been consumed by finishing my basement, so I haven't had a lot of time to do any painting. So for my last post, I guess I'll have to postpone that for a while. Anyways, here is a figure drawing fron last week's session. I'm ok with it, but I felt that I needed to find the shapes faster and not noodle so much in the details. The quest never ends. Hopefully I'll be painting soon. We'll see if that actually happens.

Blah.

There is a severe lack of color on this blog. Time to do a painting. Now only if I could remember how.

A Meeting Drawing...

Meetings seem to be the place I come up with the very few ideas that are in my brain. Believe me, there aren't that many of them. All of my Avalanche colleagues have taken them already! In the midst of 2 really bad drawings, a little gem emerged. It's not finished, but it has it's moments. I love it when a quick sketch comes out better than a planned, lengthy drawing session. I may have to take this one further.

I'm back...kind of.

It's been a while since I did a figure drawing that I felt somewhat good about. This morning was a really good one in my opinion. Not because the drawing was great, but because I felt like my drawing ability to see was slowly returning. I think medium has a lot to do with it. I began with vine charcoal to block in forms and get my proportions right. It's SO forgiving you can move stuff all over while trying to get it right. Once I had that in, I went for the charcoal pencils and compressed charcoal to get the darks and details. I made the mistake of thinking my drawing was good, and then leaning over and looking at Adam Ford's. Not a good idea. But I think this one turned out well. The face leaves a lot to be desired, but that's what I get for leaving it to the last 15 minutes.

Figure Drawing Dump

Here are a few figure drawings from the past month or so. I've been using vine charcoal, compressed charcoal, and black NuPastel lately, and I like the result. My favorite is still the black NuPastel. All 18x24 on paper.