Ok, I’ve been a PC user for a couple of years now, and I only used macs in for classes in college and that’s it. That has change now, because I work in a MAC only studio. I was skeptical at first but after using OSX for over a year, I’ve decided that I’m going to migrate to the MAC, specifically the G5. I have been using ZBrush for the PC at home and I was wondering if it is any good on the MAC. Are there any compatability issues, is it slower, etc. I’ve done a search, but there weren’t very helpful. Any help or advice would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Hi, I’m not exactly a ZBrush power user yet, but I use Zbrush in my home G4/800mhz iMac flat panel, with 768 mb RAM on Jaguar 10.2.8, and have no complains…
Is fast and responsive, never crashed yet, my renders have a good timing (always below 2 min, but as I said I’m not yet so demanding), didn’t use it in our new G5 because the G5 is for PDF Prepress workflow and is always busy, but man, in the G5 Zbrush should fly!, is a great hardware beast.
I’m in printing industry, and I can assure you that Zbrush is very stable in the Mac, more than others veteran apps, and the people in Pixologic did a great job porting this beautiful piece of bytes.
Hope this info help you in your research.
Welcome to the Zbrush community and welcome too to the Mac Legion 
hi, i am a macuser, but still have macos 9 and an old g4. but, i think zbrush is doing very fine. only high polycounts are an issue… due to the fact that my machine is really slow. but zbrush is very stable, indeed it never crashed since i got it in january. hope that helps
Thanks for the replies. This leads to my other question. Can I change my PC license to a MAC version
You’ll have to ask pixologic about tranfering licenses. I don’t think you’ll find an answer about that here.
As to how Zbrush performs on a Mac. I can’t say that I’ve pushed it to it’s limits, but so far I’m really enjoying it. I use Maya, and I’ve found that having Zbrush open on one monitor, and Maya open in the other allows for some great interactive use. Especially with texturing. I paint in Zbrush, save the texture, go the to the other monitor (Maya), update the texture, and voila, I get instant results. I think it’s much better than using Photoshop to try and do the same thing. Now, in Zbrush I can see “EXACTLY” where the texture will go, and how it will look. Also, I’ve had some pretty heavy scenes in Zbrush, like a mountain range running with the same model imported into Maya. Pretty neat if you ask me.
Here’s a screenshot if you’d like to see it. The object isn’t too heavy I guess. 80,000 polys. A funny thing though is in Zbrush there isn’t any framerate issues, but in Maya this model slows down the whole program. Chunk, rotate, chunk… hahaha!!!
http://homepage.mac.com/chadtheartist/.Pictures/mayazbrush.jpg
Oh yeah. I’m using an old Dual Processor 1Ghz G4. 768 MB Ram. Nvidia Geforce 4MX. Two 17" CRT monitors. OS 10.2.6. Wacom Intuos 2.
I started with Mac, migrated to Windows, and have been really contemplating Mac again. So I would also like to thank the members for posting this info as well.
Jesta78 I think I remember Aurick posting about this in the past, and if my memory serves me, I believe there is a nominal fee for “side grading?”, to the Mac version. I might be wrong though.
Pixologic does offer its existing customers a cross-platform migration at a 50% discount off the regular price ($199.50 instead of $399). Please conact me at [email protected] for more information and instructions.
Zbrush on the Mac. Well we use it in a production environment and it has saved us thousands of hours. I mean that literally. With the new features we should save thousands more. G4 and G5 systems don’t care about the app. The G5 systems just work damn fast!
We use Zbrush for effects, digital painting, character concepts, character creation, texturing and sometimes for baking special things into textures or environments.
Have a Happy Halloween.