Hi everyone. I’m about to buy a new PC for 2d drawing.
But i’d also like to try zbrush. I have some skills in 3d modeling and 2d painting, howewer i haven’t used zbrush’s full potential because i couldn’t get as many polygons i wanted.
So, what is the main part in PC for zbrush?
Always wanted to create something like this:
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?t=135211
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?t=136873
But for now i can do it only in 2d.
RAM directly affects how many polygons your models can have. ZBrush can use up to 4 GB of RAM, so we recommend 6 GB in your system. This gives ZBrush as much as it can use while saving another 2 GB for your OS and any background apps. (Windows alone uses about 1 GB of RAM these days.) You can certainly go with more RAM, but ZBrush won’t benefit from it. Other apps you have might, however.
CPU affects how fast ZBrush renders. It also affects how smoothly it can interact with your model while you’re sculpting. ZBrush is multi-threaded, so it will benefit from as many processors or cores you can throw at it. (No computer on the market today has more cores than ZBrush can handle. Not even close.) A quick and dirty rule of thumb when comparing CPU’s is to take the number of cores and multiply it by the processor speed. So 4 cores at 3.33 = 13.32. 2 cores at 4.25 = 8.5. What this means is that four slower cores will give better performance than the CPU with two much faster cores.
The only other thing to affect ZBrush’s performance is the hard drive it’s installed on. ZBrush uses its own virtual memory file, which gets used when you do HD sculpting, switch between highly detailed SubTools, calculate large displacement maps, etc. The faster your drive is, the more quickly ZBrush can write that data and get back to you.
ZBrush does not use your graphics card, so there is no need to spend big bucks there. Not for ZBrush, anyway. If you’re going to be using other apps, too, you should see what their needs are.
Thanks a lot, aurick! Irrefragable answer.
I’ve got an issue as well, I just recently purchased 12gb of memory, for a total of 16GB. I was fully confident when I went into the new Zb4 trial version, but It only gave me a minimum of 2000 and max of like 4096. Whats up with that? How come I can’t allocate more ram? I just recently built my computer a few months ago, so its up-to-date running Win7x64.
ZBrush is a 32-bit program. In order to be able to use more than 4 GB of RAM it would have to be a 64-bit program – something that can’t be accomplished without significant overhaul of the code. There has been a lot of demand for this feature and the development team has been looking into it. That’s all I can say.
However, even being a 32-bit app ZBrush is capable of working with ~20 million polygons on most systems. And if you use HD you can go up to 1 BILLION polygons. If you make good use of SubTools, HD, etc. you will have absolutely no trouble creating highly intricate creations.
I’m totally new to Zbrush and getting a memory error “Insufficient memory of system RAM is a result of editing a 3D mesh with a higher polygon count than the system is capable of handling” I’m running 2.9 AMD Phenom quad core, 6gb Ram, and Windows 7.Although i’m running a trail, I’m not sure if my settings are accurate. Every time I set my compact mem to 2000 mb it resets to 256 when I restart it. Same for maxpoly mermesh 21.8 and HD preview maxpoly 10.2. What am I doing wrong or what can I do?
Thanks, Aurick, for the ZBrush configuration info.
I am about to build a new computer from scratch and am interested in similar issues. I most use ZBrush, Maya and Photoshop and wondered what would be your recommendation for the best configuration for all of this. Motherboard? Graphics card? CPU? etc.?
Aurick,
My Decimations keep crashing unfortunately. My computer has so much ram
the guy at the store told me not to bother buying so much. My Model has about 15 million poly’s as it crashes everytime. Due to insufficient memory. if ZBrush is a 32 bit program I have it loaded in my program files (x86) does this have any affect? I needed to load vcredist_x86.exe and winhttp.dll just to get decimation master to start working. But it hasn’t worked yet! I’m stuck with this life untill I can figure out this decmaster problem. Very frustrating, anyway thank you for your time Aurick, it’s cool how you help people.
Paul