Aaaarrrgggh! - that is how I’m feeling right now about the fact that Zbrush is not 64bit! I have been butting my head against that ceiling way too often of late - it’s driving me nuts. PLEASE pixologic, do not wait until version 5 to release a 64bit version of Zbrush - I don’t know if I can wait that long.
Any reader’s who support my plea, please voice your support in this thread.
Seems no one care about… 
But I agree with you, a 64 bit release will be than nice.
Converting to a true 64-bit version requires major rewriting of the ZBrush code. What good is it to simply allow use of more than 4 GB of RAM if ZBrush’s features haven’t been optimized to actually capitalize on that?
This is not something that is feasible for a point update.
As previously stated, ZBrush 5 will be 64-bit. Demanding it sooner will not change the realities of how soon it can be delivered.
By the way, right now you can hit massive polygon counts simply by breaking the model up into more SubTools. You can also hit up to 1 billion polygons using HD sculpting and these details can be converted to displacement, normal or texture maps.
I have to agree with Aurick on this one. Very rarely do I run into major problems with Zbrush concerning the lack of 64bit. When doing things like AO masking it can take a while…but other than that I don’t really hit a ceiling in what I am doing. I typically end up with, at most, 6-8 million polygons on any given object. My system defaults to a little over 22million I think. I could always push this up a bit to allow the 6million mesh to support it, but to what end? no texture map or 3d printer can handle that quality so adding it is just wasting my time.
Yeah - obviously It can only come as soon as it’s ready. Realistically, I don’t expect my plea will make much of a difference in when that is, but one can hope.
Personally, I’ve had a number of projects where I’ve hit that ceiling, especially when I start trying to do any processing on my mesh (like decimation master). I have to point out btw that the max poly count indicated by Zbrush is misleading. In practical terms, I find the actual limit is significantly lower than that number if you want to do any of the kind of processing I speak of, or want to add large textures and so on. I have 24 gb of ram, and an i7 950 processor with 20gb of free space on a solid state drive for Zbrush’s cache, and I start running into problems sometimes at 17mil points, depending on what I’m doing.
@Aurick - yeah, you can break up your model or use HD geo, but there are drawbacks to those approaches that make me leary of them. Mind you, I haven’t given the breaking-up approach a very thorough investigation, and I should do that before discounting it.