Wow, that’s looking good. I like the snarl, the teeth, and the fur on the snout.
“Any suggestions on how to deal with this?”
Ask Pixologic to expedite the process on their 64 bit release of Zbrush and buy as much ram as can fit in the slots of your motherboard 
Seriously though, it’s happened to just about everyone on this board I’m sure. You can try and lower poly counts, cut out things that can’t be seen that might be sucking up memory etc. Not sure if there is anything in your recovered files folder but could check there maybe. Usually it’s found in C:\Program Files (x86)\Pixologic\ZBrush 4R2\Recovered Files
At any rate, really inspired by your dedication to this craft and how far you’ve pushed fibermesh in such a short time since its release.
Unfortunately everything wayniac said is true. Until Zbrush is release as a 64 bit app, all the memory in the world (past the first 4 gigabytes) won’t make a difference. One thing I’ve found that sometimes works when I get those errors is to just wait it out for a few minutes. Every once in a while (not very often, so don’t inflate your hopes too much) Zbrush will recover from the “not responding” state by itself. I usually give it around 5 minutes and if it hasn’t come back to life at that point, then you’ll need to restart Zbrush. Just to add to what wayniac said above regarding recovered files, you can access that folder in light box. Click on zbrush in lightbox and recovered files should be the third folder from the left. Double click on that and you’ll be able to see what’s there, if anything. If it did happen to make it to that folder you’ll need to load the document and drop it on the canvase if I recall correctly.
Sorry about your crashing woes, Rick. Most of us are right there with you.
Amazing!!
Thanks guys, frankly I’m not surprised by the crash I have a ridiculous number of fibers and polys on this. I hope I can get it to work because I liked the way he looked coming out of a cave. I’ll try deleting some un seen polys and maybe losing a fibermesh layer or too. I’m sure I didn’t lose the tool and I was saving frequently. Appreciate the help.
astonishing work Rick, really nice work on the render and on the fibers!
small_orange_diamond:)
just had a nightmare about those things.
WOW - great image Rick! small_orange_diamond
-R
keep on the good work!
Hey Rick, the puppy looks great! Thanks so much for sharing your experiments with us.
As to your question, the ‘General CG Production Rule’ is to incrementally save and version up as you work (probably every 15-20 minutes of work that you don’t want to redo), which would likely allow you to retain at least some of that three hours of effort. Most places do a _v001 , _v002 etc., in the name of the file before the “dot filetype”. For example, “Werewolf_Fibermesh_v001.zpr”. Natural pauses in your work, are usually a good time to save and version up. Never trust your machine or 3D application to operate 100% perfectly, 100% of the time. 
And yes, there are so many ways to easily eat memory in ZBrush. It’s almost criminal that this application is still 32 bit, and won’t use over 4 GB of system memory in my 12 GB machine. Version 2 used to have a 64 bit version, but for whatever reason-- they stopped supporting / developing for it. 
And this is really weird, after major makers of the more popular OS’s on the planet, have said (for years now) they were not going to support 32 bit applications in the near future.
With all the new features that have been added to Zbrush since v2, I fear converting it over to 64 bit would be a HUGE development effort now.
Keep at it, Rick. Looking forward to seeing what you do with the sculpt.
-rowsby
Thanks guys.
Hi Roger sorry I couldn’t make it the other night to the ZB think I had a MIB press day and I was all talked out.
Rowsby,actually I have been doing that for a change .After losing a bunch of work on this earlier. I did manage to save the tool of the beast shortly before the crash. It was when I tried to save the project that it crashed. I managed to eliminate some polys and think I can get it to work now. Hopefully I will have some time this weekend to work on it more. I want to finish so I can move on to something new.
Dammit, Rick… Just when i thought i had gotten the hang of things…
This is so awesome.
You are the master, whom everyone should learn from.
Yeah, decimation master helps me when my scene files get so big (500-600mb) that it takes 3-5 minutes to save. And sometimes I get that memory issue when I try to render those scenes too large, and decimation master addresses that problem as well.
But I’m glad you got things working again. Would have been a tragedy if some technical issue kept this from being finished. It’s an awesome piece!
Glad to read not all work was lost look forward to seeing the final img
great! congrats for the toprow! you deserve it. Maybe a little more hair at the legs…? Anyway, great expression, great materials, hair and sculpt! and i like how you resolve the composition.
Great Wolf, love the hair!
Wonderful,great beast !
Your work is a great source of inspiration!
Nice work man!Especally the render of the skin and the teeth.Looks awesome!!But there is a little bit shortage.First the tendon of its foot looks excessively.It make me feel that its fur is not thick enough.The second its eyes looks a little too hasty.You can do it better!!Anyway it’s a great work! carry on!!small_orange_diamond
Working on this some today I got the beginnings of the cave to work. I did a quick render just to see how it looks and I have to say I’m impressed with what you can get right from ZBrush. I thought I would post a screen grab show the render settings and also how it looks with no post work in PS(but I did put my name and wip in PS.
Can’t figure out how to not have the document settings in the shot. First try it was right over the image . This time on the side but moves the render settings down. I pretty much used Maxter’s transparency settings.
I was going to try spotlignt on the cave but can’t seem to get spotlight to work so I quickly polypainted it. I was able to add images to spotlight and but when I turn on the circle thing ,it is transparent. The little icons show up when I mouse over them but when I turn on RGB and zadd and paint over the image it just paints black. Any ideas what I am doing wrong?
Anyways still a work in progress. I want to make the cave thing better add some roots and maybe a little dead grass and a BG rock formation.
Back to work.
Attachments
Hey Rick!
Really big fan! Definitely digging that last composition. Nice use of colors as well…