ZBrushCentral

First post, some questions

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

This is my first post in here, so hello to everyone!

I am interested in buying Zbrush but first i have some questions.

I know that in few days the version 4.0 will be available for customers, will i be granted for a free upgrade if i buy the 3.5 version today? In that case do i have to order the 3.5 or pre order the 4.0?

The second question is a technical one. A friend of mine experienced a constant crash of zbrush while saving/loading tools and documents. He has the same OS as me (windows 7, 64 bit). Your forum also reports this problem few times, so i’d like to know if that has been solved before proceed with purchase (or wait for the 4.0).

thanks in advance for your reply

#2

if you buy 3.5 you “should” get 4 for free. (I’d ask support about it though).

Crashes in Z all depend on what you’re doing during saves.
Always save with geometry at its lowest subD level for all subtools.
Always remove masking from all subtool geometry.
Always give Z a couple seconds after doing these and then save.

If you’re still getting crashes then you’ve probably pushed your computer more than it can take. Just because you have 4+gigs doesn’t mean Z can use all of them. If you’re watching movies, listening to music, etc all of that takes RAM. So just because you can tell Zbrush to give you 30million per mesh doesn’t mean it should all of the time need to remember that. The number of layers that you have within subtools also effects file size/save load times. Textures applied to the mesh as well as polypaint also effects this. At some point with layers you may need to commit them to the mesh. You can also save out other tools as “layers” and import them ontop of the original mesh, that way each layer is now actually only a single mesh, etc.

#3

Well, his problem were not a memory related problem, instead was something related to his os. Something about windows 7 and zbrush. His crashes were costant, i mean that everything he want to save/load causes zbrush to crash. Even if there were nothing on the screen.

Answers on forum suggested to turn off the recovery file under preferences settings or reinstall zbrush again and again. But as far as i know no one of this workaround worked.

I wrote to pixologic three days ago about those issues, but i did not have any answer back. So i’ll wait to 4.0 to purchase the software, just to be sure.