ZBrushCentral

ZBrush crashes like a monkey driving a car with a six pack of Bud Light

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Well first off I’d like to say hello to everyone in the Zbrush community here. I am thoroughly excited to drown myself in the 3D world as much as I can. I would write my computer biography here, but im not going to…soo…yeah. lol

Anyways. I found Zbrush, and it looks like an absolutely incredible program. However, it will not start- or very rarely…and even then it is not gauranteed that it will stay running. When I do very rarely get it to run It is through some kind of luck or chance involving me pressing or holding the shift key in different compinations or w/e when i click on the Zbrush3 shortcut. I do not have a custom UI, and if I do- i do not see the configuration file for it in the main directory. I have not installed any plugins…or anything at all for that matter because I have not been able to get or keep Zbrush running. Does anyone have a similar issue…or even better, a matching solution? Any help would be great, thank you. I look forward to hopefully being able to contribute to this community.

#2

Perhaps if you posted some system specs we could help find a solution. Some crashing does occur, but yours sounds liek a system issue, specifically RAM - from experience. :wink:

#3

Haha, alright. I used to think my system was pretty good, but maybe I might have to upgrade. Here they are:

AMD Athlon X2 3800+
MSI Nvidia 6800
1gb of some fast ram

Does hard drive space or any programs running affect its operation also? Is it that sensitive?

#4

Hi friend dont frustrated!
Please check in Preference>Mem the value you have there before suggest anything because like Jason say sound very rare…
Andreseloy

#5

That is really not much RAM, considering XP needs 512MB minimum unless you cleaned house in a serious way. If you have Vista, 1GB is the minimum just for OS no matter what anyone says to entice people to buy it. Then you need room for the application(s) and so on.

I really don’t know much about AMD processors and accompanying RAM, but sounds like you are a little lite.

I have run Zbrush2 and Zbrush3 (under Parallels) on an Intel based MacBookPro with 2GB RAM and zero issues since about mid beta. This is a development system so Ihave everything including the kitchen sink on it. No issues, everything runs as expected and I hit in excess of 48 million polys on some tests.

Thus if you are crashing, just running windows with ZB3, I would say it’s RAM related. I don’t know what you bought, but unless it was the top shelf stuff, then I expect you will find this is the problem. ZB3 needs RAM, and the best stuff seems to reward you with a great experience.

Now some may post sasying they have cheaper RAM and no issues. Probably true, but do they have the same setup as you? Are you using the same RAM? Is it just one of your sticks?

90% of the time - computer problems are the RAM. I’ve had 10 systems all running the sam RAM and amount inthe past, 4 were slow and 2 kept dying. Of these six, each had 1 bad stick of RAM. All the RAM was from one supplier, but was not ‘top shelf’, but 30% less cost.

Another area that might be of concern is disk space. Got any? :wink:

Hopefully this is of some help. :wink:

#6

Well, I uninstalled Zbrush and then reinstalled it. Booted up my computer and then closed all slightly memory sucking programs that i didnt need in the system tray. I clicked on Zbrush and it started up! I was excited. Then I had to go, and i came back to my computer later and clicked on Zbrush again and it would not work. I tried it over and over, and im not even sure if it was the hold down shift key trick that worked or not, but i got it to again…randomly. Zbrush seems to be extremely finnicky and/or buggy. So, I mean- it DOES work on my system…just only when it chooses too. I know I have good memory too. I built the computer myself. However I have been having a bug where in certain instances Windows Explorer crashes; but that only started recently, like 2 or 3 weeks ago. I don’t want to do another fresh windows install yet, but I am considering getting 2 gigs of some nice OCZ ram. Maybe that’l do the trick. Lol whenever I write something It ends up looking like a short story:rolleyes:. Haha, so thanks for the help so far man.

#7

You’ve got something going on in that box that isn’t right. I run ZB on some ‘underpowered’ boxes by todays standards and it is rock solid. Even on my lappy which only has 512mb of memory. (It really does work well on my lappy!)
I’ve gotten up to 2.5 million polys on it so … Yours ought to do better than that. (Yes, it was a hard drive swapping fool at this time!)

Check your box. It ain’t right somehow, some way.

#8

Hmm, you may be right. I think its probably more with windows than anything else. I am gettin pretty low on hd space though. and i do have alot of stuff installed on here which may somehow conflict in some way. you never know…stuff always gets messed up the longer a windows installation goes. I dont’ think my pc has had problems with any other program really.

#9

Can you say something nasty is in your system, can ya???

Not sounding good, get rid of EXPLODER! :lol:

You may have built it, but someone else owns it!

All the best. :wink:

#10

There are some factors to consider.

First you’ve said that you’re getting low on hard disk space. This is problematic for ZBrush because ZBrush needs a lot of disk space in order to run efficiently. The less RAM that your system has, the more it needs that disk space!

Second, have you defragmented your hard drive regularly and recently? The more fragmentation that there is, the harder it becomes for your system to use whatever disk space is free. Also keep in mind that if your system has less than 15% free disk space then even the defragmenter will run into problems!

Third, it’s time to run a complete virus scan followed by a spyware scan. When Explorer itself starts crashing, that’s a very good sign that something is seriously wrong with your system. ZBrush will almost always be the first application to be affected by problems simply because it is the most tightly integrated with your system.

#11

Mmmm. Yeah, thats funny…I used to defragment regularly but i never saw a difference afterwards. I saw sometihng about defragging in another thread i think, but uh yeah. Its probably just some program conflicts or something that didnt uninstall right or w/e. I’ll run spybot again, I doubt I have a virus but…my Norton is out of date…

Thanks for the help and advice everyone.

#12

Any serious computer user (and graphic artists fall into that realm, for sure) should defrag once a week. Here’s why:

As you use your computer, Windows writes data to your hard drive. It also deletes data. It’s sort of like a game of Tetris where blocks are filling up on the screen, and some are getting deleted. But that process leaves holes that just can’t be conveniently filled in again later. Over time you get to a point where all that’s left are holes and your computer has to try to write data where it can. Performance suffers. Eventually, it reaches a point where there aren’t any large enough holes left and it can’t perform at all anymore.

The only way to fill in those holes is to defragment the drive. During this process, your computer rewrites the data on the disk and shuffles it around to compact things as much as it can. When done, the free space that’s left is very large, contiguous blocks of free space – ideal for working with dense meshes and so forth.

Ideally you will never see a performance increase after defragmenting the drive. That doesn’t mean that your computer didn’t need it. That just means that you’re getting the disk reorganized before performance started to suffer.

#13

Alright, yeah I know wat defragging is. Although I’ve never had it described so well, makes more sense now. I’ll leave my computer to defragment while I leave for a couple days(so, if I don’t respond until thursday, well yeah. ill be gone). Then I’ll be back hopefully to test out Zbrush with my new tablet.

#14

Following advice from many moons ago, I have always installed Zb to its own partition with around 5 gig - this makes defragging quicker.

But is this still a wothwhile policy? I mean, when ZB3 uses the disk for virtual memory, does it use the partition it is on, or does it work via the OS’s virtual memory management, or can you even now set where ZBs ‘scratch’ disk is? If ZB uses its own partition for this, is 5 gig a useful amount of room, or should it be larger to cope with the higher poly meshes now?

#15

You should be able to set virtual memory for each drive in winxp and vista.

So if you have Zbrush installed on only 1 partition that is 5gigs, add a virtual memory on that same drive.

Windows treats all virtual memory as 1(example drive C has 400meg virtual,drive F has 100 …the result will be 500, but the computer should use the virtual memory on the same drive as zbrush though if you add a 4gig virtual drive to a 5gig partition with Zbrush on it.
If you set things up wrong though your computer may complain about not enough ram…

#16

ZBrush does not use Windows’ virtual memory. For performance reasons it uses its own virtual memory file, which is located in the ZBrush directories.

Given the expanded capabilities of ZBrush 3, I would recommend having a larger disk partition than 5 GB. Better safe than sorry.