I’ve been playing around with Zbrush and have good sculpting performance, but when I go to polypaint a model, the performance drops off. The model has about 3.5M polys.
I’m using an iMac with 3.4GHz i7 with 32GB of RAM. I have a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680MX with 2G RAM. What can I do to speed up performance?
Thanks,
Mike
Hey Mikey, there’s a few things you can do when Polypainting to boost performance.
First, turn off Noise if you have it on, either in your Matcap, or the Noise Generation.
Turn off all lights in the scene but one main light. If you have multiple Lightcaps, save out the Lightcaps file, and delete each light. When finished polypainting you can easily load the Lightcaps file again with all adjusted lights with individual settings renewed.
Set Preview shadows to zero in the render palette.
Turn off Preview Wax in the render palette.
If you’re using SSS on a Quad or Tri material, turn off the shader tab with SSS.
Turn Specular to zero on the Matcap you’re using to Polypaint (make a note of the setting you had)
Lastly, you can ignore all the above if you Polypaint using the Flat Material, you shouldn’t see a performance decrease with this.
The way I like to work is I’ll append a sphere and apply the material I’ve been working on to it (M @ 100% opacity), this is to make sure it’s still applied to something in the scene so I don’t lose the settings if I close or it crashes.
I’ll fill my tool with Flat Material (M @ 100% opacity), this wipes any material from that subtool, but it won’t affect polypaint.
This way when I’m polypainting, I can change between materials to preview how it’s looking.
When I’m 100% sure I’m satisfied with a material choice, I can apply the one I baked into the sphere. If it’s not showing up in your material list, drag the material icon over your sphere, it will switch to your previously worked on material with all shader settings intact.
Well this is how I go about things, a bit convoluted, but works for me, I’ve a really crappy 7 year old computer, but can polypaint up to a 20 million poly character without any slowdown.
Hope this helps a bit ~ Cheers
Thanks for the tips! I was able to speed it up by exporting the object and then reimporting it. I’m not sure why that worked, but it did.
Mike
Are you using 64 bit? I was having problems albeit I only have 8 gigs of ram, I switched to 32 bit and was able to paint my model. On 64 I got constant machine lock-ups and my memory was easly maxed trying to paint a 2 million poly model. Might want to test it on 32-bit.