Hi!!
I’m thinking about upgrading my mac book pro ram to 6 gig and I’m wondering will zbrush 3.12 support the full 6 gig or should I stick with just 4 gigs of ram?
The price for a 4 gig stick is costly I would not want to dive in and later discover it is not fully used.
ZBrush will use up to 4 GB of RAM. Having 6 isn’t a bad thing, though, because your OS and any other apps you might have running will use that. Which means that the full 4 GB can be used by ZBrush. If you have just 4 GB, then only about 3 will actually be used by ZBrush.
I was having some major issues with zbrush on my macbook pro. I had 4 Gigs of RAM as well. I just upgraded to 6 Gigs and don’t have as many issues, but it still crashes pretty frequently, and I don’t have enough memory yet to merge all my subtools when I have a large file. Pretty pathetic I know. Probably going to have to go for another 2 once the system will support it. It does help though. Good luck!
I carry 6GB in mine. This lets ZB max out and leaves 2GB free. The OS is going to want about .5GB just for playing around with, so remaining 1.5GB slack is good to pull up Photoshop or other image editor without forcing ZB3 to swap.
(Admidittedly my Macbook Pro is currently in test mode as a Vista x64 machine since ZB3.12, to be polite, sucks on a Mac unless all you want to do is sculpt. It’s impossible to get decent maps without going back to the PC version and since ZB3.12 can’t generate a ZB3.1 file without going to out as an .obj, I’ve just had to stop using ZB3.12 as it is a closed system until long-promised fixes appear from Pixologic.)
Vista or OSX, a 6 GB machine is the way to go.
HTH,
-K
Does having a decent GPU help? I have a GTX285. Can i mate Zbrush render straight from the GPU or it doesnt matter?
Except for Zmapper, the GPU is largely irrelvant (in practical terms) for Zbrush. Most mid to high-end GPUs are just fine, but most of ZB’s rendering is actually done as Pixols not triangles through openGL, DirectX or similar. For this reason, a very high end GTX285 isn’t going to add as much to ZBrush. The fastest CPU you can get will give you the most bang out of Zbrush in terms of performance and leaving at least 4GB that Zbrush can have to itself will maximize the level of detail you can sculpt in ZB.
-K