ZBrushCentral

How to handle high res ?

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

I do have only a 32bit windows vista with 2 GB of RAM.

I can make a high res mesh, it’s ok - but when I would like to use high res textures and polypaint my mesh, I get serious problems.

When I see all the great work in the gallery I am blown away, it’s just amazing.

Is there any special trick or order I should work to get that done ?
Any tricks how I can handle all these datas ?
Or is it really about RAM and CPU power ?

thank yous o much for every little help, advice and comments.

#2

It comes down to both. RAM will let you work with larger meshes. At 2 GB under Vista, you really only have about 1 GB available to ZBrush (since Vista will eat up the other GB). That means you top out at about 4 million polygons, which in polypaint is equivalent to about a 2048 texture.

Faster CPU allows you to interact with a mesh more smoothly. But that can be compensated for by hiding the parts of the mesh you’re not working with at the moment. So ultimately, RAM has the highest priority for your upgrading.

Honestly, with Vista you really should go with the 64-bit version and 4 GB (or even 6 GB) of RAM if you want to start doing anything serious.

#3

thank you so much for your reply aurick.

hmm, is there any 3d system that you suggest and that would be almost perfect workign with zbrush ?

#4

I can’t recommend a specific system. What I can recommend is some guidelines, in order of importance:


  1. More (and faster) RAM. 6 GB of the fastest RAM your motherboard supports is the ideal for ZBrush. Of course, you need a 64-bit version of Windows to go along with that.
  2. More CPU cores. Since ZBrush supports over 100 cores, having as many as possible will give the best performance. So a quad core will be better than a dual core, which will in turn be better than a single core.
  3. Core speed. The faster each core is rated at, the better ZBrush will perform. But this is secondary to number of cores. In other words, you’ll get better results with a 2.5 GHz dual core than a 3 GHz single core.
  4. Drive speed. Sooner or later, ZBrush is going to have to compact memory and write to disk. Having a fast drive will allow that to take less time. Don’t go with RAID drives, though, as that will currently conflict with ZBrush’s licensing system.

#5

I use a laptop at work for my toys like ZBrush with Vista 32 bit. ZBrush does recognize the Ready Boost feature, so it is worthwhile. I use a 4 gig flash drive as Ready Boost and it increased what I can do. ZBrush sees it as 4 gigs more RAM.

#6

Take note of when aurick said you can hide parts of the mesh. Only having the subtool your working on in view will free up a lot of RAM, you can temporarily hide the other tools. If the tool is, for instance, a body and you’re working on the head, you can hide the rest of the body’s mesh as well. This will keep your computer from having to process those polygons. It will become faster and you can zoom all the way in as if it’s the only thing your working on…too cool.

#7

And you can use the Ctrl+Shift combo to hide parts of the current subtool, further reducing the number of polygons that must be drawn.