ZBrushCentral

Questions from a newb

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

I finally have an Intel Mac and can run Zbrush 3. So I’m getting into it and for right now… i have to questions that come to mind:

  1. I have this annoying thing going on that every time when I’m rotating a model it seems to go temporarily low res while it’s rotating or moving. It goes back to the rez I’m working on when I finish doing those things. I’m sure it would be a good feature at times, but with the memory I have I would think I have some room to rotate without bogging the machine down. Where do I turn that feature off so I can keep the high res while moving the model around and rotating it?

  2. With 8GB ram on a 3.06 Ghz processor (it’s a 24" iMac) , would anyone have any idea how many polys (approximately) I can use for a model? Is there a reasonably accurate way to calculate that?

I’m SURE I will have many more questions but those are the ones on my mind at the moment.

Thanks in advance for any help.
Kevin

#2

In regards to 1, how big is your canvas? You should not have any trouble rotating an object of 1M polys without it reverting to low-res in version 3.12b. You should also check your memory preferences (Preferences -> Mem) and maybe set your “Compact Mem” up higher towards 2048 (default is 256, which would be low on your system.)

The top bar of Zbrush has a Mem indicator (it’ll appear after startup.) That “Free” indicator when you’re first using ZB will give you an idea of the amount of memory available to ZB before you start getting into virtual memory.

For #2, In terms of polys (excluding HD geometry for the moment) you should easily get into the 16M range, assuming that 4Gig (the max ZB can address at once) is free. That leaves you with 512M-1GB for OSX and 3GB for everything else (like Photoshop.)

-K

#3

Go to Preferences–>Performance–>QTransThreshold1 and set it’s value a bit higher. The value represents ‘millions of polygons’. I’ve got it set to 3. Which means that if the displayed mesh is currently lower than 3 million polygons, ZBrush will not switch down to a lower resolution when rotating/moving the mesh. If the mesh consists of more than 3 million ZBrush will switch to a lower resolution when rotating/moving the mesh around the canvas.