Hi,
please forgive the newbie question but im trying to add wood details into a pirate ship bottom which is made from hard surface blocks/planes…im running zbrush on a macbook pro i7 with 8gb memory and unless i subdevide to a mental number i can’t seem to get any joy and i always end up crashing my system.
i tried dynamic subdiv but its not working great either.
is there away to add fine details to a hard surface without going insane on the subdiv?
many thx in advance.
How many millions of polys your subtool has before Zbrush start to crash and what version of Zbrush are you using? Also if you are using a retina display.
Hi Altea, thx for the reply.
its not retina just normal display (late 2011).
i retried subdividing the original obj and deleting lower rez, its more stable but feels so heavy when moving around and sculpting and sometime the model doesn’t display in the view port but at lease the macbook isnt crashing.
it has just over 17340000 polys…and its 4r7…
I made the model larger to try to overcome the min brush size of 1 but its still not small enough, maybe im pushing it with the size of the model details vs number of surfaces or maybe im doing something wrong, don’t know.
I attached screen shots with more info-love to find out how i can add very fine details to a hard surface easily and how to go lower than 1 on size brush if possible plz
thx
after subdivifding
GPU
memory usage (doesnt seem to be high)
before subdividing and deleting lower rez
info after subdiv
17 millions with your computer specs in one subtool is way too much. You can achieve anyway even higher polygon count if you split it in several subtools, but in general avoiding subtools of more than 5 millions in order to work in a comfortable way and a top limit of 10. In small junks you could achieve a lot more than 17 millions.
Another point is that if even if doing what I say you are yet far away of what you need you could think in relay in parts of the detail in textures. Specially for structural work of large objects (a boat?) the amount of polys to make everything very detailed could be impractical. For example you are trying to achieve the shapes of the board, that perhaps is possible to depending of the size of the object, but not if you try the grain of the wood, that would need probably of bump mapping, displacement or normal maps.
Thx again for the reply.
what you recommending is the only way to go I Guess, its already in a subtool with the upper part hidden, so guess i have to divide it even more! i was hoping to be able to mirror what i do on one side to another on the bottom part.
just thinking outloud: if zbrush is the daily tool for someone and they are too involved with it i can see how its a sensible conclusion that dividing the bottom of a ship into more parts is acceptable. but from an outsider point of view you can easily think, this is really not great for a program not to be able to handle such details on one model on an i7 machine with 8gb memory even if its a laptop…its only one part of a ship.
i have looked at so many tutorials and what i seen from zbrush is truly amazing, exciting and revolutionary as a tool set. and i could see how the zbrush team are working very intelligently and thinking from outside the box to make zbrush a perfect solution with many different approaches/creative techniques to sculpting…yet i find it disappointing that i cant do this bottom of the ship with much details…since i’m a newbie im assuming that i must be missing something…i see lots of great work around from zbrush…
probably the bigger more detailed some of them r all done via subtools…for me its not practical due to the mirroring factor…
yes i can use pump maps but i wanted the detailed to be brush strokes all the way round then change some more details on the other side to make it different…
I will try to devide it further and see what happens…maybe the light bulb will turn on at some stage and see what i can’t see now…
may I ask plz if there away to over come the min brush size of one other than scaling up the model?
thank you for your time.
You can switch off the dynamic size of the brush, for that use shift and click in the letter dynamic above Draw size slider.
Zbrush offers way more poly power than any other program around. But there is a limit where this reach his maximum.
its logical for more details you need more subdivitions, more subdivition you need better hardware to handle the calculations.
really excited about the doors zbrush will open for me.
thx a lot for the tips.
as Altea said, when modeling things with great amount of detail, is a good idea to divide the object in pieces, as if you were working with a real physical design.
in this case, a real hull of a boat is not made of single huge piece of wood, it is actually made of several boards nailed to a central structure. In theory you could create each of these boards individually and have 17millon polygons of detail in each board, but that would be too much in most cases.
What I would do:
split the current hull in 2 or 3 subtools, making the divisions right between the boards.
then you can easily subdivide each part to the maximum your computer can handle, and have a lot of detail to work with.
No matter how powerful is a computer, it will always hit the roof, and then you’ll have to start applying all sorts of tricks to make things work.
For example if you are working on a creature with extreme amounts of details, you will NEVER be able to work in a single subtool, you’ll have a subtool for the head, another for the arm, maybe even another for the hand, and so on.
In my case, I have 16Gb ram, and anything beyond 20 millon polys becomes to slow and tedious to work with, so I try to plan ahead how to separate my subtools to avoid this issue, and always have a nice amount of detail, usually I try to keep it below 10million each subtool.
oh, and about the brush size:
Hit spacebar, and at the right of the DrawSize parameter, it says “Dynamic”, Shift +click to activate/deactivate
this will change the relative scale of the brush, maybe this is what you are struggling with.
Thank you, i started experimenting with subtools master and spotlight…my jaw litraly dropped of what i can do…jesus crist…this zbrush…
thank you for the tips…i will update this post eventually with my model 