HELP! Working through some very basic beginning ZBrush tutorials, with VERY basic geometry, and ZBrush keeps crashing saying I don’t have enough RAM. Running ZB on a MacBook Pro Retina with 16GB of RAM. The specs for ZB only call for 4GB… Shouldn’t everything be good here?!? I have no other apps open besides Safari for viewing the tutorials. Any suggestions?!
Thanks.
Which version of ZBrush is it?
Do you get any other errors, such as at launch?
Could you show an unedited screenshot of your entire ZBrush interface?
If it’s 4R6 and you’re doing anything complex with dynamesh, join the club 
http://docs.pixologic.com/user-guide/3d-modeling/modeling-basics/creating-meshes/dynamesh/ It states, as a starting point. Use it to get your base mesh and then lose it. ZRemesh the result for better point utilization and further refinement. HTH
That’s all well and good, but there are just as many things on using Dynamesh for hard surface modelling using boolean. And R6 is just nowhere near as stable as R5 when doing the same operation at the same resolutions. I regularly try to boolean something in R6 and get a memory crash. I fire up R5, do the same and it works fine.
Thanks everyone for responding. I am using ZB 4R6 P2. I will try to attach a screen shot to this reply. The polycount on the geometry for this tutorial is only 982K. I’ve created more complex projects with counts over 3.5 mil polys and have not had this problem. The crash occurs when I try to do a “delete hidden” operation on the higher poly subtool in this project. I was finally able to get around it by deleting a couple of my lower subdivision levels before trying the del hidden operation. Which sucks because now those levels are gone and the “Reconstruct Subdiv” doesn’t really get them back. Not doing any Dynamesh at this stage. Just the basics.
Thanks again for the help. Much appreciated!
So, here I am, further along in my attempt to work through these tutorials… I’m trying to do a simple ZSpheres figure (see below). But every time I hit “A” to preview my skin, ZB crashes. No error message, nothing. Just shuts down. I have played around with ZBrush for months before this and have not experienced these problems until now, when I have the time and am sitting down to focus on really learning the program. WHY NOW!!! Is this kind of, um… LOUSY performance commonplace when using ZB? How do you people out there ever get far enough along to create the fantastic work I see in the galleries? How is an eager beginner supposed to learn? Please, enlighten me!
Thanks!
I’m on Windows, maybe it’s a Mac thing. No problems here, but I build with Armature rather than ZSketch. Are you using classic or the other adaptive skinning method? You could reset your tool palette, but I don’t think that’s an issue. You do have the latest upgrade AFAIK.
I suppose it could be a platform thing, but I have not had any problems like this running ZB on my Mac until now. And I feel like I was doing much more complex stuff just playing around than I’ve been doing in these tutorials. But it definitely feels like a memory issue, the way the app just quits and considering the memory error messages I was getting earlier. Are there any other Mac users out there who are or are not experiencing issues like this? Is 16gb of RAM generally sufficient for most ZB work, regardless of what platform you are running it on?
Thanks!
I thought maybe if I started fresh with a new project from scratch, imported the tools that I have created for the latest tutorial project, that maybe it would solve my crashing problem. But no… still crashes when I try to preview the adaptive skin (NOT using classic skinning) on the tutorial ZSpheres figure (see above). Oddly enough, I can create a new random ZSpheres object, one that is much more complex than the tutorial figure, and preview the skin to my heart’s content! Is it possible that a particular ZSpheres objects can become corrupt and cause a crash? I’d really like to focus on learning and not troubleshooting. Any thoughts?
Thanks!
Try classic skinning. Maybe you could zip and upload your troublesome tool and others can try to duplicate the problem?
Success! Guess the moral of this story is that sometimes you just have to start over… again. And again. :rolleyes:
Interesting phenomenon, if anyone out there IS interested… Went back to this ZSpheres figure a couple of days later after saving the project. Skinning still works ok UNTIL I try to tweak the ZSpheres. A few minor moves and scales and WHAMMO!!! Trying to preview the skin causes the crash again. I’m leaving well enough alone, but MAN! THAT SUCKS!! Bug fix, anyone?!
IF you can consistently cause the crash, have no customization or additional files, support wants to see a ticket with all system specs and steps to reproduce the crash.