I noticed this crash within about 2 minutes of first testing 4R4, but it also appears to occur on 4R3, 4.0 and 3.5R3. It’s 99.9% reproducible. The problem appears to be that the alpha, produced by the MRZBGrabber, even when the entire canvas is grabbed, will produce arbitrary sized alpha maps, and many of the odd sizes can cause the alpha brush to crash. I couldn’t find anything in the forums about it.
- Start ZBrush
- Hide the lightbox to get it out of the way
- Select Tool-Alpha Brush
- Alpha->Import - load the attached alpha PSD, which was created by MRZBgrabber into an alpha then exported, and ended up sized at 987x790.
- Select Strokes->DragRect
- Use ctrl-F to fill the screen
- Start in the center of the canvas, and drag out the brush, scaling it up to around full canvas size.
- You may have to do step 7 a couple of times, though usually the first drag will produce the crash.
- Observe Abnormal Termination popup.
The attached alpha was created in ZBrush using the simple brush to drag out white boxes on a black background. I tried using PSD, BMP or TIF file formats, all will crash. Also, if you just create such a grabbed map in ZBrush and just go use it with the alpha brush it’ll crash even if you’ve never exported or imported it.
I did notice that the upload process here for the alpha image didn’t like the file format itself when it was PSD, BMP or TIF, so I zipped it. I also noticed that several other programs did not like the TIF-- such as Paint.NET. I was able to import the BMP into other programs without problems. Not sure about the PSD, as I don’t use it with anything else.
I also created several other maps using MRZBgrabber, most of them also had the problem. Especially when the details on the canvas do not extend to the edge, as the grabber then seems to produce maps smaller than the full canvas size.
The map size as produced by MRZBgrabber appears to be part of the problem. When you use DepthGrab to grab the entire canvas, you don’t necessarily get a map that is the size of the canvas-- it may be only large enough to cover the amount of detail that’s actually on the canvas. I used a ctrl-F to clear the canvas, then painted some boxes on it, but they did not extend to the edge of the canvas-- the resulting grabbed map size was something like 987x790 though the canvas was 1120x840.
So is the bug in the grabber or the alpha map tool? I suppose it’s the alpha map, but if what the grabber is doing is to be considered OK, then a lot of programs seem to have issues with funny sized image maps.
The work around then seems to be to export the map as a bmp, then pull it up in another program that can handle it and make sure the image size is something sensible-- such as the ZB canvas size you’re using, etc. Then import the adjusted map back into ZBrush and the crash can be avoided. Or perhaps there’s a good way to effect the map size alteration within ZBrush?
For reference, my system is an XP SP3 w/latest windows updates, 2G RAM, an Acer Desktop w/Intel 2.8GHZ P4, dual-core CPU. Rather underpowered, but unfortunately, I can’t try this on another computer right now because my Laptop died, which was the only other one I had running ZBrush. If someone else can verify they can reproduce the problem, it could be determined that it’s not my setup…
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A.
Attachments
CrashAlpha2.ZIP (12.4 KB)