ZBrushCentral

RAM Limitations / Dual Monitor Setup

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hello,

I recently bought a very beastly machine for the purpose of stepping into the the 3D modeling field, and i intend to create a highly detailed and complex models. The problem is that after launching ZBrush i discovered that it can only utilize 4GB of RAM (out of my 64GB) and the maximum polygon count it can reach is 50 Million Polygons. Now, i’m no expert here but i think that Developers who use ZBrush use more than that. So the question is - how? How can i utilize more of the available RAM?

Specs:

CPU - Intel Core i7-3930K (3.20GHz, 12MB Cache, LGA2011) 6 Cores
RAM - Kingston HyperX 2x8GB (1600MHZ, DDR3, Non-ECC, CL10, DIMM XMP HyperX Blu Red Series) - 64GB
Video Card - Giga Byte GeForce GTX680 (4GB) GDDR5, OC

System HDD - Intel SSD 240G (2.5, 335, SATA3, 20NM, 9.5 RS)
HDD Total - 12TB

I’m pretty sure my machine can handle more than 4GB of ram and 50Mil Polys.

P.S.
I also have 2 27" monitors (Dell UltraSharp U2711, 27") and i would like to split the UI of ZBrush on both monitors, where one monitor is clean working space and the other one is just for the menus. This is the layout i use for all of my programs. I know that there are shortcuts that can hide the ui elements but that is not how i like to work. I did discover some ancient posts from 2001/2002 about this issue, and yes at that time there was no support for dual monitors. But i am quite surprised that even after all of these years the situation hasn’t changed. Or maybe i’m just missing something here?

In any case perhaps someone here has come up with a solution? I can’t be the only one who likes to work on dual monitor setup. :slight_smile:

Thanks in advance,
Armand

#2

Right now zbrush is only a 32bit app. Supposedly the next version, zbrush 5 will be 64 bit. Until that happens you are stuck using only 4GB of ram because of zbrush being 32 bit.

You can extend one side menu off onto another monitor by just resizing the entire zbrush window to be across to the second Monitor. Not super handy imo but it’s better than nothing.

50 Million polygons is a lot of polygons, if you need more than that you can split up your model into subtools and/or use HD geometry which goes up to about a billion polys I believe.

Also don’t forget that zbrush counts in quads or points instead of tris like other 3d programs like Max or Maya, so technically that is 100 million tris/polys that you are hitting, which again, is insane and waaaaaaaaaay more than enough to get high resolution detail on any model. You can get really fine skin pore level detail on a head at around 4 million polys so you should be fine there.

Zbrush also doesn’t really use your video card at all. The main components of your computer that impact zbrush are your CPU and your ram, after that a SSD would probably help some for anything that needs to be written to cache.

#3

Eric, do you know how/where to set the path for the cache?

Thanks, willt

Zbrush also doesn’t really use your video card at all. The main components of your computer that impact zbrush are your CPU and your ram, after that a SSD would probably help some for anything that needs to be written to cache.[/QUOTE]

#4

It’s on page 12 of your ‘ZBrush4_R4_whats_new.pdf’ in the ‘ZBrush 4R4/Documentation’ folder. Last paragraph.

#5

Thanks for the reply.

Yeah i’ve heard that ZBrush 5 will support 64 Bit systems, but then the question is - what is the release date for this version and will i have to by a new version of ZBrush or will it be a free upgrade to those of us who already purchased R4?

About dual monitor, yes that’s the only solution i was able to find although that’s not exactly what i had in mind, but thanks anyway. You’d think that after about 10 years they would be able to implement support feature for at least 2 monitors but apparently no. :slight_smile:

Yes, as far as i know 50Mil polys should be enough for humanoid characters, but what about giant ultra complex boss creatures?

For example like this one -

2009___archive___p1_by_aeonseraph-d4i4eo4.jpg

I remember something about splitting the model into multiple subtools and that’s probably what i’ll end up doing if nothing changes. HD Geometry? I only heard the name of this function but haven’t yet seen this in action, sounds interesting, will definately look into it.

As i said, at the moment i’m pretty much a noob and don’t know much about this stuff but i’m a quick learner, so any help from you guys is much appreciated.

I also bought Ryan’s Video Tutorial pack from www.zbrushworkshops.com, this should help me get going. In 2009 i already started going through some tuts so thankfully i’m not going completely blind into this. :slight_smile:

Take care,
Armand

#6

Pixologic has yet to say when the release date is going to be for Zbrush five. I would guess summer 2013 or later. Every single version of zbrush to date has been free for registered users who have already purchased zbrush, so the update will most likely be free.

Subtools will be key to making characters like the image below. You will have no problems creating the below characters with all the detail you want if you use subtools.

#7

Thank you for the info Eric.

#8

Thanks Zber.
So, that .txt file points to the directory it lives in. That means ZBrush uses that directory (the directory the text file lives in) as the location for a scratch disk. Is that correct? Interesting. I recently built a new machine in which I have a hard drive dedicated to the operating system virtual memory. By doing that I believe that hard drive is locked out as a general storage area and cannot be accessed for anything except what is being used as operating system virtual memory, in which case I would not want to point ZBrush to that hard drive to use as a scratch disk. Does that sound right to you?

Thanks for your patience.

willt:idea: