ZBrushCentral

Sad story or How I lost my ZWork

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Here is my short story…I bought ZBRUSH 3 before few months, upgrade to 3.1 and use this great forum and online video tutorials to get knowledge I need so I can make my ideas in 3D. And I started…I had idea to make SHARKMAN character. Body of the shark with human arms and legs. I stared with ZSpheres. When I made my base mesh looks good I make polymesh and used every level of subdivison to achieve better results. When I finaly finished I realize that I need more polys on the sharks head, so I separate head and subdivide it more…Then I do the same with the arms and legs. Soon my SharkMan was maded out of lot of Subtools (Left Arm, Right Arm, Head, Body…) Each of the parts has a few millions of polys so my ZBRUSH was so slow that I work in very difficult conditions. I spend 1 month with this figure and made it looks very very good, I even used Polypainting and my SharkMan was slowing down Z3 a LOT but looked FANTASTIC. Then my SHARKMAN.ztl file becomes buggy and at the end he was broken. So now I can’t use that file anymore and ALL of my huge work is lost. Why ? Because of so much data that ZBRUSH just can’t handle on my system.
So how to avoid this problems in the future ? I see that a lot of you has 100.000 polys character that are very detailed and looks perfect. How to do this and use maximum of my 100.000 polys?

All the best

#2

I always save files in increments, never overwrite my old files because of this.
you might want to try using this plugin in the future:
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/zbc/showthread.php?t=49080

try sending your model to pixologic they may be able to fix it, also you need to set up your memory settings properly in the preferences menu.

#3

You can sculpt in millions of polygons but , you need to save your tool perodically, with different names (shark01.ztl, shark02.ztl,etc) there is a great script for that, written by Svengali, called quick save (you can find it here:
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/zbc/showthread.php?t=49080&highlight=quick+save
). This awesome script can save incrementaly so that if you loose a tool or it gets corrupted you can always get back to the previous tool that you 've saved and sculpt from there.In this way you don’t have to start all over again.