ZBrushCentral

Question on system setup -

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

I’ve read a lot on this board about memory optimizations and settings, and had a quick question. I have a Dell Precision T7400 Quad Core with 10GB of Ram running on XP64. I’m currently working on a model that has about 8 million polys and it’s really slowing down. Is this typical for a model of this size. I hear stories of people getting up into 20+ million polys and wondered how much better a computer you would have to have to accomplish modeling at that high a poly rate or am I not using my system performance to it’s optimum? Under MEM i currently have it Ram set to 2026 and max polys set to 12. Should I up these values? Any help on this matters would be great.

Steve

#2

Your system is obviously a 64-bit OS or you couldn’t have so much RAM. You can therefore set the Compact Mem slider to its max of 4096. That will let ZBrush use 4GB of your RAM.

Keep the undo values at 4. Max Polys Per Mesh is fine where you have it.

You might adjust the multithreading steps setting in Preferences>Performance. With your system, a higher value is probably going to give better performance. Try doubling it, then adjust up or down depending on how things go.

The biggest place where your system will shine is not in how many polys you can have per SubTool, but rather how many SubTools and how many layers you can have without sacrificing performance.

#3

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#4

:confused: confused…

what does this achieve? or rather where can i find more information on this?

#5

i think one of the keys here is what aurick was saying about how many polys per sub tool. i have a dual quad core workstation with 12 GB of ram on vista64 and have some minor slow down during sculpting with 8 or 9 million poly models, but if i break the model up into a few subtools, the performance is always better even if the poly count is the same or even higher.

also, i don’t know about you, but i tend to subdivide the whole mesh instead of the just the areas i need to. i’m working on that…better use of the polys my machine can push will probably go a long way.

hope that helped :slight_smile:

#6

Zbrush saves your memory and writes it to disk in compacted form. It basically has its own memory management system like back in DOS days. Setting it up high makes it save out less often, which should be desirable if you have a lot of memory. Basically you are telling it not to do its memory voodoo unless it gets to using a LOT of memory. Alternatively, though, setting it really low might be faster because it will write out all the time but won’t take so long to write, so it depends on your system.

I think 4g is max zbrush will use at a time, unfortunately. However, that is the max you will get on normal vista 64 per application anyhow. So it is not as big of a loss as it seems. Windows ultimate and windows 7 can go higher, and hopefully zbrush 4 will allow for higher mem usage.

#7

Thanks for the replies, I’m at 33+ million polys and it’s running but slow. Just slows down when I show all subtools. I’m wondering if I’m just using too many polys or something, but some of the other models I see on this forum are SUPER high detail. I’m right in believing you need to be around subD 7 to use alphas for tight details, or am i missing something?

#8

This is a quote from Pixologic features

HD Geometry

HD Geometry is the next evolution in digital sculpting. With the ability to divide your model up to a billion polygons, now your limits are based only on what you can imagine. You can focus your attention on specific

So, how in the world could anyone get up to a BILLION polys if Zbrush is only utilizing 4GB and getting choked up at 33 million polys?

#9

It’s because you’re not using the HD Geometry feature. HD Geometry is not regular geometry. It uses a special section of the Tool palette, and rather than storing the polygons in RAM it writes that data to disk. Then it uses the preview feature (press the A key) to show only as much of your HD mesh as your computer can handle. Press A again and it switches to a lower resolution view so that you can choose another area to highlight.

http://www.pixologic.com/docs/index.php/HD_Geometry