ZBrushCentral

New iMac or newer iMac and zbrush?

Does anybody here use zbrush with the newest iMac that’s come out ?

I have an old imac from 2010 that’s as upgraded as it can get and my zbrush model lags after i hit 3 million polys.

I was wondering how the performance is with zbrush and the newest iMac, what your specs are and how many polygons you can work with before the model starts to become heavy and lag.

It’s been frustrating because i have to stop working on a model once it reaches 3 million polys and i can’t progress like i want to in zbrush because of that.

Hi @chrisgonzalez,

ZBrush can perform well on relatively modest hardware as long as you understand what the limitations are. Even users with far more robust hardware can experience “lag” when working in a suboptimal fashion in the program. I just want to make sure that you don’t spend a lot of money on a new computer, only to find out the same issue is present.

The more points you have on screen at once, the slower navigational performance will be, especially if polyframe mode is enabled. This is why when a mesh has lower levels of subdivision, it will display those levels when navigating with the mesh to keep performance faster. If you’re working on a mesh at a single level of subdivision, there will be no lower levels to display, so performance will be slower from having to update all those points on screen at once. This will be true on any system to various degrees.

For users with more modest hardware, it can be useful then to avoid letting a mesh of a single subdivision level get too high in polycount. Better then to use the tools that require this to create a mesh of a moderate polycount that captures the necessary form, and then remesh it with ZRemesher or other to create a new , clean low poly base, and subdivide that base upward for the purpose of sculpting fine detail.

As far as a hardware recommendation, I can’t recommend anything specifically, only that the specs should meet or exceed the recommended specs listed on the following page for effective sculpting on higher polygon counts:

https://pixologic.com/zbrush/system/

Good luck!

1 Like

Thank you for the tips Spyndel. I’m still pretty new to the program and I’ll look into zremesher. I’ve just been using dynamesh but at around 100 resolution instead of the default 180 to help with the polygon count. I’ll try to employ subdivisions more into the workflow though. I do want to get a new computer anyways but for now i’ll just try to make the best use of what i have.

Yeah that’s what i was planning was to buy the newest intel iMac that came out recently. I heard about the apple silicon imacs coming out at some point in the future. I wasn’t sure how long it would be until then. I also wasn’t sure how much of a difference in performance ability there would be between the current intel iMacs and the apple silicon ones. I guess i’ll just wait more and try to get better in the program in the mean time because i did want the next computer that i buy to last me for at least 5 - 10 years into the future. Thank you for the reply.

Yeah I was hoping for a 27 inch or larger version of the Apple silicon iMac to be unveiled at this recent event. And with a lot better performance spec options. I guess we’ll have to wait on that version until either later this year or next year.

I’m undecided right now on whether I should get last years 27 inch iMac 2020 with maxed out specs where you can get up to 128 Gb of ram and up to 10 cores for the processor. Or wait until the Apple Silicon 27 inch or larger iMac is released with better performance options.

Or I was thinking of maybe getting a customized Maingear Pc computer where i can get more processing cores and ram and can upgrade it along the way. I’ve never owned a non Apple computer before though so the unfamiliarity of that is why I haven’t gone that route yet.