ZBrushCentral

Ctrl D Death BOO

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Yep a long hard Sunday night, 10 final minutes to tweak a face perfectly. Yes, very happy with it.

Time to save for the night.

Oops, my finger hit Ctrl D by accident instead of Ctrl S.

BOOM. ZBrush LOCK UP. Grey overlay.

ZBrush attempts to ‘subdivide’ my last mask (eyebrows) only. On a mesh that is only 135 000 polys.

Thankyou ZBrush, for a frustrating, very annoying end to the night. Instead of ending on a high note, ending wondering, why would the programmers who make ZBrush, allow a shortcut key right beside Ctrl S, to run an operation that explodes the program?

BOO Zbrush creators. BOO.

An obvious suggestion >> Ctrl D on a mask (that I hid so forgot it’s even there) should have a warning, ’ Are you sure you want to subdivide this masked region? '.

Because this old, never used, poorly designed (Ctrl D my mask) operation, that you have hotkeyed ‘beside the letter S’ for Ctrl D, is a disaster that just most of the time will blow up your program and frustrate your user.

:angry:small_orange_diamond:-1:

#2

A few points.

I know it’s always frustrating to lose work due to error. But some of this might be helpful in the future:

  1. Zbrush autosaves your work, and a recent version of your file should be in the Quicksaves folder.

  2. If the program actually crashed, a recovery save may have been created in the recovered files folder.

  3. Many of Zbrush’s Key commands are customizable, if you find some of them problematic.

  4. The “grey overlay” when ZB hangs on a Windows system doesn’t always result in a crash. Sometimes it’s just a result of ZB completing a lengthy operation, while a user tried to give further input to the program. Sometimes if you wait it out, ZB will recover.

  5. File saving can be done manually through the UI with File>Save As, or Tool>Save As depending on the situation. I personally prefer to do it this way, as it costs an extra second, but is more precise and deliberate and avoids situations like you describe. As is true in ANY high end graphics program, save manually often, in a series of iterative save files. You simply cannot rely on program stability across infinite hardware configurations. I even do this in Photoshop.

Sorry about your mishap.

#3

The “grey overlay” when ZB hangs on a Windows system doesn’t always result in a crash. Sometimes it’s just a result of ZB completing a lengthy operation, while a user tried to give further input to the program. Sometimes if you wait it out, ZB will recover.

You can press the escape key to cancel a command even while it’s being processed. So if Zbrush is taking too long and you’re afraid it will crash you can press escape and it should cancel the calculation. Also be a bit patient as even pressing escape can sometimes take a while. Give it some time and the process will finish or if you pressed escape it will cancel it eventually. Of course this is only if you don’t get the crashed program message. Sometimes Zbrush feels like it’s crashing but it’s just doing some complicated calculations and has to sit down and do some long hard thinking.

#4

Thanks for the advice.

I’m at work today (that other crash was at home). Twice today randomly, I hit Ctrl-S to save, not a very complex file. I get the lock up ‘greyed out’ ZBRUSH.

I tried the escape key but just says ’ close or wait '.

One thing I’ll give ZBrush …

  1. It’s my favorite program.
  2. You get good at it as it forces you to redo work randomly.
  3. It is an excellent test of patience for someone especially if they are in a tired or under caffineated state, or they have pressing work to complete for their CG Supervisor and it kicks you with random lock ups (regardless if at work or at home).