ZBrushCentral

Am I screwed?

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

So I think I may have painted myself into a corner. . .

I have a very high res (28 mil poly) object that I now cannot do anything with because I run out of RAM. I realize (too late, of course) that I should have used HD sculpting. I have also merged subtools at different stages, so there are no lower subdivisions.

I need to get this object to a manageable size to export for digital printing.

I have tried the following-

-Decimation Master (Ram error when Preprocess Current is almost done)
-Rebuild lower subdivisions (Ram Error)
-Export .obj and .stl (Will export, but resulting objects won’t open in Maya)
-Remesh all (on PC, unpredictable results, but I’m not used to 3.5. the operation finishes, but the resulting geometry is way off)

I’m on a 8-core Mac with 8 gigs of RAM, vers. 3.2

Also tried on a colleague’s 8 core PC w/ 8 gigs Ram, vers. 3.5

I have spent the morning searching the forum for other ideas, and have not found anything that works. Does anyone have any insight as to how I can reduce my mesh’s resolution, or am I just screwed?

Thanks!

#2

you might want to try the group split option which will separate your tool into subtools by polygroups.
you can try auto assigning polygroups or one of the other methods, whichever works best for you.
if you run into Ram issue with the auto polygroups try selecting parts of your model one at a time using the transpose masking and then use group from masking.
ideally this way you can break up your tool into its pieces then reconstruct those one at a time, i suggest saving out each piece separately until you can get them to a manageable size.

#3

Thanks a lot Spaceboy! I finally have time to give this a shot today, I’ll let you know how it goes.

#4

Thanks again Spaceboy, that worked, I’m now back on track!