I have artists with machines that have 64GB of RAM telling me that it’s not enough, and that they need 80GB or more.
There’s nothing else running on the machine–only ZBrush.
That sounds quite excessive to me to be sculpting a model (but I’m not a ZBrush user).
Can anyone from Pixologic or day-to-day ZBrush users let me know if this is sane? Or are we tripping over a bug or doing something very wrong workflow-wise.
Thanks much,
-miker
It depends on what you’re doing.
The Recommenced Specs are 16 GB or greater. With proper polygon discipline, that is plenty to do quite a bit in Zbrush comfortably. For the vast majority of the sort of things you do in Zbrush, increasing amounts of RAM offers diminishing returns. However, those specs are a bit old now, and the resolution requirements for media keep increasing.
If you’re working in a production environment with ultra high rez textures, you may require the extra ram to handle the extreme polycounts. RAM wont help you sculpt on meshes with extreme polycounts, but it may mean the difference between an ambitious operation completing or failing. It may mean the difference between an artist able to save a little bit of time with a direct approach, rather than using a lot of tricks and compromises.
There’s really no way to gauge your needs without knowing more about what you’re doing. If people who ARE familiar with what you’re doing are giving you reasons as to why they need more RAM, then I don’t see any reason to doubt them.
If it’s out of a general belief that more RAM will drastically improve the performance of the program and alleviate the need for proper technique and polygon discipline, then I’d be skeptical. Ultra-dense meshes (40+ mil polygons) will always be problematic to work with in a number of ways, and should be avoided where possible.
If, however, your production needs require you to regularly handle meshes of that size and greater for X reason, then yeah, you probably want as much RAM as you can put in there.
Thanks for the reply. I’ll try and get some more info about the specific assets in question.
Cheers,
-miker