ZBrushCentral

Question About Setting up Memory Preferences

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hello,

i tried searching for both RAM and Memory related topics and could not find anything to help me answer this. I am new to zBrush and am a little unclear about what to set up for my memory preferences. i know there must be a thread on this so if anyone can link me to it, thank you.

if not

I am on a Macintosh dual Quad Core - 2.8ghz with 10 gigabites of RAM
when i use zbrush i will be using it solo, and am wondering what i should have my memory preferences set at.

i guess the options are for “compact memory” and “max polys per mesh”. both if which i am unclear on. to maximize my usage, can anyone recommend what i should set these at based on my system specs. should i just turn them all the way up? your help is much appreciated.

#2

Keep in mind while you have 10gigs of ram, Zbrush is still a 32bit app. And from I know of PC, running it on a 64bit system the max Zbrush can use is 4gigs of memory. Zbrush I think also starts to compact memory when you are idle too.

I guess compact mem could be set to 2048 as a good start. On my system when I had 2gigs of memory and a 4gig thumb drive memory boost, Aurick said to set compact mem to 1024, then increase by 128 until I start having trouble.

I’m not sure if setting it to the limit of your memory (4gigs) would help or not. It could possibly backfire and become sluggish if you set it too high due to forcing it to compact the memory right when the app reached the memory limit, or taking longer to compact 4gigs compared to 2gigs.

Polygons limit, it’s more of a precaution I think. So you don’t divide something so high your system doesn’t recover.

Like say you have an 8 million polygon mesh and you hit divide, you’ll probably regret trying to create a 32 million polygon shape. I often here 20 million being the sweet spot for most systems.

So, to be on the safe side, set it for 15 million as default. When you try to divide a mesh that’s over 15mil, it will warn you and stop it. Take that warning as a good time to save your work, then adust the polygon limit to what you need if you think the mesh will be in a reasonable range, then divide again.

Don’t forget to set this as you default prefs, otherwise your changes will be gone.

#3

many thanks for your answer. this helps