Sorry, there is no giant creature just yet. I really would like to know the answer to my question. I know memory plays a huge part while using zbrush, I only have 3 gigs…Can someone tell me what a good mem setting is or would be running Vista ultimate with 3 gigs of ram? that’s for my laptop. On my desktop I’m running xp pro with only 2 gigs of ram. I’m going through tough times and cannot afford a new computer or more ram, but hope that if I can produce some good work in Zbrush someone will want to pay me to create.
As I recall, Zbrush can automatically detect ram and set appropriate settings accordingly, other than that, you can tweak it to your liking. I ran with 2 gigs on my laptop using Zbrush before I built a desktop machine. I honestly didn’t feel to overly restricted with my polycounts because as a general rule I try to acquire as much detail as I can with as few a polygon as I can. Most times 1-2 million does the trick for me and I like to use subtools to isolate items and focus where the details are.
Good luck with your endeavors!
something worth noting, zbrush cant use any more than 3 gig of ram because it isn’t a 64 bit application
not true. on 64-bit machines zbrush can use upto 4 gigs of Ram
for a 3 gig machine i really wouldn’t put the compact memory setting over 2048, but its proabably safer to put it to about 1536
So if my next machine be it a laptop or a desktop would anything more than 4 gigs of ram be overkill? I read in the online documentation that zbrush automatically saves to disk. Is there a way of deleting those autosaves? My laptops hard drive is only 160 gigs. Thanks.
well you want Zbrush to be able to use a full 4gig so you actually want more than 4gig. alot of newer PC/laptops use the intel i7 (blloomfield) which uses triple channel Ram so it goes in 3 i.e 3gig, 6gig,12gig… So getting 6gig would be a good minimum so that zbrush can use a full 4gig to its self, then the 2gig left over is used by windows and other appz. if you get a system that uses dual channel Ram then get at least 8gig.
When you are working in Z its saving temporaily to the Zbrush root folder. look in the Vmem folder while your working on a Tool and your’ll see all these temp files being created. but once you close zbrush they are all deleted. for this reason its important to have decent spead hard drive which no one seems to think about, because you can have a super powerful spec machine but if your hard drive has a slow Read/Write speed you create a bottleneck because pretty much every windows Reads/Writes to disk at some point in the virtual memory or like zbrush has its own temp foldr for it. i’m not saying go out and buy the biggest SSD possible bceause you have to spend alot on SSD for it to actually to be worth it. but if you can afford multi SSD i would get it in a RAID 0 configuration.
also as fast a CPU you can get, but don’t go top of the range at the time because they become really expensive fast for a few hundred extra Mhz per core which isn’t worth it for the money.
i’m hoping zbrush 4 will be x64 so it can use however much RAM you got, and i heard that there is still a bit of weirdness going on with RAID so i hope support/stabilty gets better for that but TBH i’m not sure on the RAID situation so don’t hold me to that, it might be really stable at the moment.
(on a side note, i understand why people get latops becasue you can take them around with you etc, but i pretty much see them as a waste of money these days. for what you spend and what you get laptops are pretty lame unless your just using them for internet and a bit of gaming etc. they always seem to run slower by the end of the day, and after 6 months they also seem to slow down compared to when you first got them. i would rather carry round a desktop on my back with a massive battery than get another laptop for working on)