Here’s the issue at hand.
While trying to render at the “best” setting, the program almost always crashes. I tried with different iterations of my model but it seems that this not a model specific problem. Rendering in a bigger resolution than 2000px will guarantee a crash.
Anyone else noticed this behaviour?
I’m running the 3.12 version of zbrush and no matter how much memory I assign to the program I will always get the crash.
My system. Mac Pro 2.66 Core 2 Duo, os 10.5.6, 6 Gigs of memory and plenty of free disk space.
Thanks in advance
like clock work, save the document, then render, it will crash then go click reset. load the doc and it will render be sure to zoom out some so that it all fits in the screen or you guessed it crash reset repeat. welcome. you are not alone.
Thanks for the answer. At least now I know that this isn’t an isolated problem.
I am unable to duplicate this. Could you please provide specific steps for how to do so?
When I render an image that’s larger than the space on the screen I get the spinning wheel, but that merely shows that the computer is working. The render continues just fine, and the progress bar fills up until the render is complete.
It’s possible that what’s happening with you is that you’re assuming the spinning wheel meant a crash because the part of the document currently being rendered is off screen and so you can’t see anything happening to the canvas.
Hi aurick. No I’m not getting the spinning wheel. The program crashes. Completely. I even get the os dialog on what to do next. Reopen the program, ignore etc.
I get hard crashes all the time, generally I don’t even get to rendering…
Specifically when I create a large canvas, lets say 3k+ - I add a tool to the canvas and it goes haywire - the canvas whites out and stops refreshing. When I try to zoom the canvas it just dies. I’m defragging my drive as I write this as that seems to be the common feedback. it’s pretty frustrating, can’t recall zb2 ever being this touchy.
MacPro 2x 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Xeon
10GB RAM
OS X 10.5.6
~sG~
edit
Is there anyway to set zBrush’s scratch disk to something besides the core volume? I don’t see anything in prefs, is there a config file somewhere that I can edit?
If HD stability is so important it would be nice if I could have a controlled space for zB.
Something that might help…
I had some random crashes here and there when rendering, but only on my quad mac pro. The 8 cores at work rendered fine. What I did…
-Get the model close to how you want it to look.
-Exit edit mode.
-Refine the view with the move, rotate, and scale widget.
-Still not in edit mode, switch to draw.
-Barely click and drag outside of the canvas, like your drawing a tiny model but not in the view port. This drops everything to pixols and the model can’t be picked back up.
-Render
This worked for me. It seemed the high polygon model caused the system hiccup. When it’s just a 2.5d image that can’t be picked back up into edit mode, it seemed to work for me. Great thing is, you can still adjust lighting, DOF, fog, etc. just like it’s 3d. Try it out, see if it helps.
I can record it for you if you like. I have had it happen nearly a hundred times, different ztools, no joke.
Oh I believe it, that workaround I just posted was a result of some stubborn crashes throughout my last project during renders. It definitely doesn’t happen every time, or even that often. The workaround itself could be totally bogus, but after a few crashes it seems to work every time. I normally render at 3k x 4k or higher, so the canvas size doesn’t seem to be the variable for me.
Now that I think about it, I rendered a canvas at the max size two months ago. It took about ten minutes and was printed 5 feet wide! The damn thing looked incredible though. Last project I got some crashes doing basic screenshot renders,…
Still not a big issue at all on my end, though.
Just a note for the developers, that’s about the same point in the render that it crashes for me on the rare occasions it fails. It’s never at the beginning or middle, almost always on the last level.
How many materials do you have in your ZStartup folder?
just an update here -
I had 57gb free on my startup volume (500gb) so just +10%…
I cleared off another 200gb (now +50% free) and did a defrag using iDefrag and my hard crashes from 3k+ canvas use has stopped- as well as the display refresh errors.
Seeing how critical disk status seems to be for zBrush I think it’s very important that we have a way to manually select the scratch disk zb uses. I would consider getting a high-speed drive just to keep mounted for scratch space. On the core volume, you’ve got a lot of inherent instability coming from constant use by the system, apps etc. An isolated environment would be ideal…
Another thing I’d like to suggest is a heads up display of scratch disk ‘health’ in zb- and possibly a pop up warning on start up if your disk is likely to be causing issues. I know this seems extreme, but I think it’s reasonable seeing how debilitating a full or frag’d drive can be to zb. Hard crashes are about the worst thing possible and leave no room to save your work. Additionally, it would allow people to know what’s ‘ideal’, the way I’m set up now is working, but I have no idea if it could be better?
~sG~
I can confirm what jamespthorton says. It almost always happens at the end of the render not at the beginning or at the middle.
Well what you say SuperGlitcher is quite interesting.
I’ve noticed lately that I have the same graphical glitches you mention and I’m in a tight disk space as well. Even though I have 20% of my hard disk space left.
I’ll try to delete some of the stuff to see if that helps at all.
Yep! Same exact thing always happens to me on ZB Mac 3.12 too. Gets all of the way to the end, then blink crash! I only have a few additional matcaps in my Startup folder. Pretty frustrating problem, especially since it almost makes it to the end and I get my hopes up then—ka-blooey!!!
Nice presentation on the video, by the way. Pretty funny!
I just wanted to note, now that I can get stuff on my large canvas… I’m having this same crash when hitting render including the refresh errors… again.
The save doc, open doc method allows me to see the canvas, but if I resize it goes black, and if I hit render / best - it hard crashes immediately (i.e. the application disappears and I get a nastygram from osx)…
If anyone has any progress please post!
Thnx.
Aurick I did a new test with only the default materials and I got the same results. I will post the video soon.
SG_ I have 165 gb free.
ps I normally have 142 materials on startup. is that a bad thing? I only have render crashes and occasionally a zoom crash.
Yes, it’s a very bad thing. I’m surprised that ZBrush is working for you with that many. Each startup folder should only have a maximum of 25 items. Any more will cause unexpected behavior.
I really don’t know why you’re getting this rendering crash. I have not been able to duplicate it on my machine at all. Another thing I’d like you to try at this point is disabling your plugins. Do this by clicking to launch ZBrush and then immediately holding Shift until the launch finishes. Check to make sure that you don’t have any plugins anymore. Now go ahead and try your tests. If the problem now disappears, then one or more plugins is the cause.
I disabled the plugs per your note and I’m getting the same behavior.
Maybe there is some other common link for this issue…
What are the system specs of the box you’re using?
…other installs on your system?
It’s possible that there may be some type of process conflict.
~sG~