Hi,
I’ve had this problem happen randomly on both Mac and Windows machines.
I will open a file that I worked on (for many, many hours and / or days of course), and it will just instantly crash ZBrush. Therefore losing all my progress.
This happens on Mac and Windows, there seems to be no common reason as to why this happens.
Does anyone else have this problem? I’ve never heard of this happening before.
Thanks
Ben
Check your memory settings in Preferences>Mem. Setting compact memory to a lower value (if you had it set high) can sometimes help.
Not a bad idea to save incremental versions as you work in case the file gets corrupted for some reason.
thanks for your reply marcus_civis,
I save often. I was working on this project, and saving as it progressed. ZBrush was a workhorse for days, making major progress - adding tons of detail, painting, etc.
now when I try to load any of these files it saved consecutively, it just crashes immediately. There is no way to recover all this work.
I am so confused because I’ve never heard of a program doing this before. It’s not like it crashed, and it was unable to recover, or the file got corrupted or something. It just saves a huge file that can’t be opened - therefore losing your work. I’ve heard there was an error with Photoshop that would corrupt files saved over a network- they quickly fixed this bug. I’ve also worked on Photoshop documents that were several Gigs a piece (huge hi-res posters for print). They didn’t crash…
I can’t find a rhyme or reason for this. This has happened to me while working on a MUCH lower poly project on Mac OSX. And now this happened to me on a much higher poly project on Windows 7 - 64 Bit. I have tons of ram, an 8-core… makes NO sense.
Honestly, I have invested soo much time, money and energy into ZBrush. It is an amazing program, revolutionary, really. But I can’t use a program that would do this. I am at a loss as to what to do, I can’t be the only person this is happening to.
Please will you open a ticket with Pixologic Support - with a link to this thread - so we can do our best to resolve this. In order to ensure the quickest help possible, please also include your serial number or other purchase info so that we can pull up your account (which is required in order to receive support for the software).
Thanks,
thanks marcus_civis,
I have an open ticket with this issue.
I am so confused, ZBrush is used in a production environment. I couldn’t imagine this happening to someone who was in a production environment with a deadline/ client meeting. Losing my work was personally devastating, but at least I didn’t have to answer to anyone. 
Is there any indication as to what could possibly be the source of this issue?
Seriously, anything. memory, poly count limits, I will practically do anything as a workaround to this issue. (I really don’t want to switch to Mudbox 
I am having the same problem, was this issue ever resolved?
I have also opened a ticket.
I went back to previous files to try and figure out what was causing the corruption. I had created a character with about 10 different subtools. I had been using the retopology tools to create things like clothes etc.
After creating what I wanted, I would add thickness and create an adaptive skin. I went through this same process for creating the base mesh for the hair, only this time, I went to Polygroups–> Group Visible (since adding thickness in topology creates multiple polygroups) before appending it to my subtools. For some reason, perhaps someone can explain to me, this is causing the corruption.
So, when I save out the ztool with the appended hair (the one I made a single polygroup), close zbrush and try and reopen, it crashes. When I do the same thing without creating a single polygroup for the hair, it works just fine.
hi kdshay,
i’ve found out what my specific problem is. it sounds different than yours to be honest. I’m not sure why Grouping Visible polygroups would crash ZBrush…
my specific problem was related to saving files out of ZBrush over a WiFi network onto a Shared Network USB drive…
(here it is in more detail - please avoid saving over the network to a shared network drive (via WiFi).
i was saving to a network drive over the wireless network. apple airport extreme has usb ports where u can plug in a usb drive and share them over the network. it’s convenient because i can share this drive across mac and pc/ multiple computers.
however i think what was happening was ZBrush was saving huge files over the wifi network, and it was taking so long that ZBrush was running out of memory / not fully writing the files.