PRM Review

Jon Sanchez
Sep 21, 2016
3 min read

Production Modeling

PRM known as Production Modeling is a Zbrush boot camp, and while there's a lot of content available online from Lynda, Plural sight (aka Digital Tutors), YouTube and more, the discipline and amount of training material provided by Full Sail’s PRM Course are certainly intense yet extremely rewarding. Combined with Alumni Mentors like Julian Moran, I was able to learn all sorts of techniques and tools in a program that is quite different than Maya or any other 3d modeling program for that matter. I quite often relied on Mud box due to it's simplistic and more reminiscent UI and workflow to that of Maya, and now I realize what makes Zbrush not only relevant but rather king in respects to sculpting.

Week 1

I'm a long ways away from where I'd like to be as a 3D Artist but that will come with time. It is my understanding that should I have taken Game Art instead of Computer Animation there would be much more training associated with Zbrush and meticulous modeling techniques taught, not that I'm losing out, however, my discipline does focus more on the animation aspect rather than the modeling aspect, and obviously so. For these reasons, I will continue to push myself in Zbrush after this course applying what I have learned and of course learning new tricks and techniques surrounding this program.

Week 1 Screen shares:

Week 2

With only having lightly dabbled in Zbrush in MCR and CDC having 10 assignments in week one was both stressful yet fun! I thought Week 2 would be even easier , I was incorrect. Week 2 went on to refine our skills teaching us new techniques and workflows, Fortunately I did good this week as well.

Week 2 Screen Shares:

Week 3

Now, of course, Week 3 is certainly going to be a little light right? well just a little bit, I was ahead of the curve until I ended up sick and going out of town to tear up a deck single-handedly while being sick. Sadly, I was in no mood to work on the final assignment which was most important. Week 3 you get to choose if you want to do Character Modeling or Environment modeling by choosing either the Character Stu from week 1 or the Treehouse from week 2 to complete as my final. I was able to add more details and various assets for Stu but needed to get him towards 95% compete. As you can see, unfortunately, he is not; rather, he's more or less 60% complete. I managed to do well despite my setback.

Week 3 Screen Shares:

Week 4

Ok So its time for the Finally, Either Stu or the Tree House. I chose Stu, I've always been drawn to character creation and animation, so I thought this was a great challenge. By this point I should have had 95% of my model complete before beginning Week 4, unfortunately, I did not. I went back and refined my Stu Character and posted in concept share, however, it was brought to my attention that the hands were a bit lackluster, so I went back and refined it, My Instructor advised that it was a bit rigid and possessed too much detail compared to the stylized character, though he did require me to refine it once more, I felt compelled to make the necessary adjustments, I smoothed out the hand relieving some of the details and relaxed some of the joints. The first time I played with the joints I exposed the model into Maya and rigged it real fast using a heat map bind, I didn't have to readjust the skin weights so it was fairly quick. My second goes around in adjusting the fingers, I instead used the transpose tool in Brush. Due to time constraints foresaw by the instructors for week 4, we could use Zremesher to retopology. Once that was all done We then had to export displacement maps and normal maps to Maya with the base mesh into a preexisting scene. Here’s a few renders including my Final.

Week 3 Screen Shares: