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Too many Backup List count-out

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

I am not getting much in terms of support for this issue so I wanted to post it here and see if anyone else is experiencing the same thing. I have tried tweaking the memory settings, mult-draw, and about every other setting available.

I get this error when I subdivide or use HD sculpt. I have an Intel Dual Core 2 Duo 2ghz, 2GB ram, NVidia 7950 GT w/ 756mb on board, Vista 32bit, latest NVidia drivers, 200GB Harddrive w/ 100GB free.

Sometimes I receive an error “Insufficient core memory”. Does this mean I need more RAM?

I also receive an error “Too many Main List count-out in list.cpp Line:624”. ZB, that is some nasty ass exception handling you got going on there. My ZB usually ends up crashing after these errors.

“ZBrush Executable has stopped working.”

Sometimes I receive the error message attached.

I have been running ZBrush with pretty serious reliability and stability issues since I purchased it. At times I open ZB and it just sits there with the ZB logo and closes when I click it.

For the amount of time I saved in sculpting I have paid for it two fold in troubleshooting.

Anyone have any tips?

Attachments

Error.jpg

#2

at what value have you the compact.mem set?

Andreseloy

#3

I’ve tried 1700, 256, 512.

#4

the other thing i can suspect if you hav modified your ZData…but from this i have no idea what is going on…sorry

Andreseloy

#5

It’s funny, I’ve seen that mentioned in a few other threads but none of the posters actually did edit their ZData and it was suggested in all of the posts. I would be more inclined to think that ZBrush has a bug than believing that a user actually went into their data files and edited some data. It looks to me like the virtual memory indexing for the memory mapped file implementation has a bug, but I’m not looking at the code so I can’t say if that’s true.

At any rate, it’s a real problem for lots of folks, much like the other bugs. These are showstoppers and it’s beginning to feel a bit like working with Microsoft tools ;). It will get better with the service pack but I just wish I had known this was coming.

#6

Are all the other posters with this problem running under Vista? If so, I suspect some incompatability with Vista.

Because I’ve only had a few crashes under Z3, and most of them have been in the retopo tools, or some zsphere ops after repeated use.

#7

Can we test that theory? If you’re not having any stability issues then try this:

Open the dog model at startup.
In Tool>Geometry> Divide him six times
In Tool>Geometry HD> DivideHD once
Click the Sculpt HD button

You should get the error popup.

This error could also occur if you just divide the mesh up to 8 or 9 times under the geometry tool menu.

Give that a shot and please let us know what you get.

#8

Kosher: That is not a bug - you are simply forcing ZBrush manipulate higher density meshes than your system is capable of.
As in your example…

“…In Tool>Geometry> Divide him six times…”.

Dividing the dog mesh six times will result in a 32 million points mesh - I assume you mean dividing it 5 times for a total of 6 subdiv levels? In this case the mesh will have 8.2 million points (and these with UV assigned) - Do you have sufficient amount of memory in your system to properly handle this?

The problems you encounter is simply because you have modified the MaxPolysPerMesh to higher level than your system can handle. This will also cause HD problems because ZBrush will attempt to give you access to MaxPolysPerMesh polygons out of the HD mesh at one time, and if it is more than your system is capable of it will result in unexpected behaviour.

You should restore the MaxPolysPerMesh back to a lower values, and when sculpting, you may also want to disable the UVs to allow you to manage more polygons. You can also manage much higher polygon count by splitting the mesh into subtools.

#9

I added a gig of ram today, which puts me at 3 gigs, but it still didn’t help. When I look at the title in ZBrush, I see that it says I have over a gigabyte free.

Is there any way to display my poly count in ZB? How accurate is the memory usage and “free”?

What’s the recommended amount of ram for sculpting in HD? ZB touts up to 1 billion polys but what’s the recommended hardware for this?

Thanks for the reply and thanks in advance for the new response.

#10

Disregard that last question. I found the poly count and it looks like I am running very high (around 250 million in the HD mode). Now I just have to figure out how to get my poly count down in the places where I need it. Retopo with projection seems to add about the same number of polys in the same places, which seems to be in all the places I dont’ really need the detail :slight_smile:

Any tips on lowering polys in the regions that I don’t need it and raising them in the regions I do?

#11

Set your MAXPOLYMESH lower. You’re working with too high a ‘section’ of the HD model. I’ve hit 65million on 1 gig w/ no problems. My maxpolymesh is set to 6 mil.

Also, if you are running 32 bit XP, the max ram a process can use 2Gig, because the memory addressing is split 50/50 with the os. So if you add 3gigs, your OS will be living in the 1 Gig, while 2 gigs could be used by Zbrush. Any more ram will just be allocated to the OS. With a 64 bit os, the max amount of ram your process can use ( if you could buy this much ) would be 2billion gigabytes… :wink:

#12

Hey, great reply and thanks. I actually had my maxpoly set to 50 (is that 50 million?). I went ahead and lowered it to 6. I am using Vista 32 bit and it shows 3gb in the system properties.

I actually click the HD button and it says previewing 26 million polys. When I look at the tool I actually see 53.x million polys so I was wrong in my last post.

When I press ‘a’, in HD sculpt, it says it’s scupting 5 million in that region. I was able to turn my HD divide level up to 2 and now its’ working!

Thank you so much for your help!! This is exactly what I needed w00t!! :cool:

#13

Oops. One other issue. Now that I am using the sculpting region max poly thing, it doesn’t obey my radial symmetry and the other parts of the mesh do not end up getting sculpted. I am guessing that radial symmetry is sculpting regions that are outside of the HD culling area?

#14

When scultping in HD the only areas that will be affected by symmetrical sculpting are the active areas, so you can really only sculpt with single axis symmetry. Even then you have to make sure that the area you select is directly across the axis (i.e. have your model square on the canvas) otherwise what’s ok on one side will miss on the other.

#15

Just an FYI, unless your operating system is a 64-bit version of Windows adding that extra GB of RAM did pretty much nothing. 32-bit versions of Windows only make a maximum of 2 GB of RAM available to any application. So you still can’t set Compact Mem higher than 2000 and the MaxPolysPerMesh needs to be kept at something appropriate to 2 GB.

The only exception to this is if you use the \3GB switch in Windows, which is actually unsupported by Microsoft because it’s known to be problematic.

Believe it or not, I’ve seen some users have worse performance after adding 3 or 4 GB of RAM!

#16

Aurick,

Looks like I might be going back to Vista 64 then. Does the 64 bit version of ZBrush run in pure 64 mode? Does it have to do some double thunking stuff and run in a 32 bit to 64 bit translator? I had some issues with performance in 64 bit windows because my apps were running in 32 bit mode still.

If I install 64 bit windows, how do I get my license activation transferred?

Thanks again!

#17

Well, I put in the 4gb of ram and am now running ZB on vista x64. I still can’t get the full model to preview in HD mode but ZB is showing the total 4 gigs available. I get the backup list issue still saying that list.cpp has an error. It just doesn’t seem right.

#18

Kosher…you cannot preview HD geometry in real time, because 4 gigs is not enough. Give 32 a shot.

#19

My older home PC is capable of sub_Ding the dog mesh to SDiv 6. 8.176 Million polys…and I did raise my max polymesh to 50. The HD geometry only gives you 3 levels. I’ve got the dog at 523.239 million polys now. I’m using Windows XP Home Sp1 32 bit with 2.5 gigs of ram and virtual mem set at 4 gigs.

#20

oops! Delete me:rolleyes: