Hey there,
I’m fairly new to ZBrush. So I apologize if this sounds really idiotic. I’ve spent the entire day working on a sculpt. When I closed down ZBrush I saved out my work to a .ZPR file. The file is 1.5 GB, that is massive right?
I now can not open that file due to lack of memory. I’m running 16GB ram.
Besides buying more ram is there anything else I can do to open this file up? If not what precautions should I take in the future to prevent this?
ZBrush is a 32-bit app. As such, your operating system won’t give it more than 4 GB of RAM. Adding more will accomplish nothing. ZBrush 5 will be 64-bits, but I have no information regarding when it will be arriving. And 64-bits has other issues, such as 10-15% slower performance than the same program in 32-bits (something that kind of makes a difference when you’re sculpting millions of polys in real-time).
Depending on how long you’ve been working on the project, your undo history may have gotten large enough to tip the scales. Try turning on Preferences >> Undo History >> Skip Loading. If your file then loads, immediately save it again – preferably as a ZTL (using Tool >> Save As) since that does not store Undo History or a number of other things that can increase the file size. There are of course a number of other things you can do at that point to reduce the file size, such as getting rid of unnecessary layers, decimation, retopology, etc.
Thanks Aurick, that worked!
Z4R7 64. I’ve had problems with this lately, and experimentation shows that once you get over 2 GB a project file just won’t reopen correctly but that same project if stored in Z tools will open. I’ve even artificially duplicate all of my sub tools to make a z tool up to 4 GB and it opens fine. So there’s some kind of glitch in the Zproject file size limit and it’s easy to get around by saving as AZ tool. And as mentioned, if you try to open a Z project that is too large, it looks like it won’t open it but it really does open it up to the point of about 2 GB. So you can find the partially loaded file by tapping on the golden S in tools and your partially loaded Ztool will be listed there even though it doesn’t open up normally