ZBrushCentral

Answered: cage, scale, project issues

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hi! Maybe it’s just for me, but I found two annoying glitches in zbrush 4.

  1. Seems cage function doesn’t work well (for some meshes). When I push cage button at lowest divide, it recalculate geometry, as it should. But when I turn it off, geometry doesn’t return to previous state, and at highest divide it looks different then at the same divide before using of cage. Normal form of geometry can be returned only with undo. How it can be repaired? Can anybody confirm something similar?
  2. And the second glitch (or feature maybe). Imported meshes doesn’t have 1-0-0-0 parameters in tools->export section. GoZ works well enough, and meshes appears in 3ds max in the right place with right scale, but strange export settings remind me about terrible scale issues from 3.5. Are they really fixed? Which export setting are right for zbrush 4?
  3. There is similar question at cgtalk-about corrupted project. Yesterday I opened my project (via File->open), and it doesn’t had my main model. Just few meshes-oler parts of it at the tool menu. There wasn’t any warning or error. I saved my project fine, but after I loaded it again it was partial. It’s too danger, so in the future I’ll use Svengali’s quick save plugin-it still works fine. Thanks for any help.
#2

1) I can’t duplicate this. Cage turns on and off just fine with the geometry returning to the non-cage state. If you change levels while the mesh has been changed by Cage then the levels will naturally be affected by this change. But that’s only an issue if what you’re describing happens. I’ve tried everything – even changing levels while Cage is turned on (at which point Cage automatically turns off and the mesh returns to its non-cage state).

  1. I’ve send a couple reports from people still having random problems with the scale settings. The vast majority of users are not encountering this, and even those who are seem to be having it happen with only specific meshes. You said it yourself: the model is still going into and coming back from Max correctly. So it sounds like things are working right.

  2. ZBrush 4 has a fail-safe feature that prevents corruption of files. If you save a model and something goes wrong with the save then nothing will be written. This means that if you’re saving over an existing file, a failed save won’t corrupt your previous work. If you’re writing a new file and something goes wrong, nothing will be saved at all. That way you won’t later go to open your last file, only to discover that you can’t. If you get a saved file that was saved in Z4 and is somehow corrupted, upload it someplace and then submit a support ticket with info for how to download it so that we can test.

To avoid this problem, make sure you’re not trying to make your computer do more than it can do. One of the most common culprits is cranking up the MaxPolysPerMesh setting too high or setting the Undo values higher than the default value of 4. The Undo values should only be changed on a short-term basis when you know you might need a few more. Once you’ve gotten past that point the Undo values should be returned to 4 before you continue. Otherwise system resources are being used to store a whole bunch of states of your model – even a 1 million polygon model can become the equivalent of 64 million polys if you max out the Undo settings, and that is just too many polygons. It’s a guaranteed way to encounter saving difficulties.

#3

Thank for answers, aurick!)
About corrupted project-I’ll try to play with different performance settings, hope it will help.
About strange cage behaviour-maybe it’s very rare event, I had it just for one model. I’ll notify if that glitch will repeat with another geometry, maybe there is some type of meshes that cause it.