Extremely slow, need HELP!!!!

[hell666]

Hi everybody!

This time I am participating on a challenge on CG-Hub and choosed “Snake Eyes” from G-I- Joe. I am working on it since the last week and it looks fine till now. BUT: This figurine makes me a lot of problems. I hope anyone can help…

The affected file has now 1.3GB and it takes 10-15 minutes to load/save the file. Switching from one subtool to another takes 2-5 minutes. Hiding any subtool takes 5 minutes. Zbrush crashes down once in an hour, which means 10-15 times a day. That´s really hard ´cause this in turn means, that I kill 100-150 minutes (more than 2 hours) each day with waiting while loading the file again and again.

Zbrush works extremely slow and it is no longer fun while working with this file. When I switch off all subtools and work only with one of them, it all seems okay and fast as usual. When I switch on all subtools and try simply to rotate the figurine, it takes endless minutes.

My questions are:

1. Is there any way to reduce the size of the file?
2. Is there any way to fasten my work?

I cannot believe that this is correct. Seams that I made any mistake. I cannot believe, that you all have similar fat files for only one figurine. How should it be possible to add a base or any background … I would have to wait 5 hours till the file would open. Cannot believe.

Here some facts:

FILE:

• Subtool #0 says, when I scroll over it:

Polys: 10 498 048
Points: 10 498 689
Total Polys: 41 342 657
Total Points: 41 341 658

33 Subtools.
The largest Subtool is #0 with 10 498 048 Polys
2nd-largest (the pants) with 4 521 154 Polys
The rest is between 500 000 and 2 000 000 Polys

COMPUTER:
Mac OS X 10.5.7
2 GHz Intel Core Duo
2 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM

I´ve added a screenshot. Maybe someone can find there any wrong button or anything else, which I did wrong.

I switched all subtools to their highest level. Subtool #0 and #1 has 7 Levels, the rest between 2 and 5 levels.

Thank you very much!!!

[goast666]

Did you increase your memory settings or up the max poly per mesh setting?

both are found in
preferences>memory

I don’t have 3.12 and I heard that on the Mac you can hit higher Polycounts per tool without the major slowdown you see in 3.1. But even with that I doubt very much that you can hit a 10million polygon subtool without slowdown.

Are you using Layers? Each layer basically doubles the file size from what I’ve seen. If you have layers on lvl7 (10mill) then each layer has to remember where all 10million points are on the mesh.

Having all of your subtools at their highest subD eats little bits of memory for sculpting. But for rotation that uses CPU and it has to process all of the points in the mesh when you rotate.

I recommend breaking up your two highest meshes into smaller subtools. I am assuming the 10mill mesh is the body.

To help on file size always save at the lowest SubD on all tools.
If you are using layers you can collapse the layers down and save them out as independ tools and import them again later if you need to edit them, or want to keep a different file incase they need to be edited or changed later for some reason.

Hmm…that’s about all I’ve got.

[hell666]

Hi goast666 and thanx for your answer!

I am using ZB 3.2 and now did the following steps:
I have splitted now my large subtool #0 and deleted all those parts of the body, which I don´t need (hands under the gloves, legs under the pants, etc). Now I am down from 1.3GB to 700MB and it is a bit easier to handle.

After browsing some topics in this forum here I recognized, that there are a lot of users who got same problems but with less polys than I had. So I guess it was a mistake done by myself and not a bug of Zbrush or of my computer.

I am happy now to go on with the work on the figurine and I will search for more possibilitys to delete more parts.

Thank you very much!!