Looking to buy zbrush 4r4 but, for a specific purpose. We are only looking at building models for 3d printing purposes. No animation or other work is going to be done. What we are looking do are recommendations for building a PC based machine. Can anybody provide some advise?
Actually the system specs for ZBrush are remarkably light, regardless of your intended use.
RAM is the most important, but the recommended amount is 6 GB due to the fact that ZBrush is a 32-bit application. This gives 4 GB to ZBrush (the maximum the OS will give it) and leaves 2 for the OS and any other apps that might be running in the background. So faster RAM will give you more bang for your buck than additional RAM beyond the recommended 6 GB.
Second most important is your CPU. In this case more cores is more important than faster speed. When comparing CPU’s, a quick-and-dirty approach is to multiply the speed by the number of cores. This gives you a value that you can use to roughly compare that CPU to others. So let’s say you’re looking at a dual core at 4 GHz and a quad core at 3 GHz. 2x4=8 and 4x3=12, so the second one wins even though each core operates at a slower speed.
After that is your hard drive. When ZBrush needs to write to disk, the faster the disk write speed, the faster you can return to sculpting. This speed can be achieved in a number of ways, such as using RAID 0, SATA 3, SSD’s or any combination of thereof. The fastest you can get is multiple SSD’s in RAID 0. But it’s also an expensive option. You can work around this by using smaller size (such as two 240 GB drives, giving a total of 480 GB) for your system and ZBrush scratch drive, along with a larger and slower disk for data and most of your software. And of course if you’re not really going to be pushing ZBrush at all you might hardly ever write to the scratch disk in which case any old drive would do fine. So definitely focus on RAM and CPU first.
ZBrush doesn’t use your graphics card at all, so that won’t matter. Any card on the market today is more than sufficient for ZBrush’s needs.
Bear in mind that all of this info is for ZBrush. Other software may have recommendations beyond this. Especially where the GPU is concerned.