Hello lovely people!
I’ve been using ZBrush for a long time and I have never encountered anything like my current problems. I would be most grateful to anyone who could shed light on my troubles and help me to find a solution.
ZBrush just isn’t playing ball at all and, of course, it is central to my business and to my livelihood. I am literally at my wits end. I shall try and summarize the events of the last week. ZBrush last worked ‘normally’ on Monday 26th (four days ago) since then it has been doing the following:
From Tuesday onwards old ZBrush projects open sporadically, some will open, most won’t. They fail on loading with the old “problem with a subtool” and then “problem with the project” double error window.
I lost three days of work with projects that, one day prior, opened fine. Fortunately I had taken the finished project into Keyshot and saved it so I was able to, at least, retrieve an OBJ of my work. Stupidly I thought my problems were exclusive to that specific project so I moved on to the next project…
Yesterday I had a new horror; I needed to create STL files for a series of caricatured figures, we did, that have received approval from the client.
As is usual for this kind of job I created a project to collate all the figures in one place, combine, decimate, scale and output individual parts. Each figure had it’s own ZTool, five figures, five ZTools with multiple subtools (between 8 and 20) for each figure. Over the course of the day I combined and engineered the figures; typically this would involve dynameshing the heads, subtracting a neck post then combining the heads with hair and sometimes a hat; things I don’t do with models until they’ve been approved so I don’t have to do these processes twice.
Having consolidated the heads into single subtools I decimated them. As the assets connected to this project were relatively small I saved about every two to four hours. When I’d finished all the heads I used the 3D export plugin to scale and output the models. Having experienced slightly erratic results with the plugin I tend to do a real-time sanity check – save an STL open it in Meshmixer, check the measurements are what they should be, and if they aren’t go back, tweak, export and check until all is right.
The first indication I got that something was not right was that “Export Visible” was missing out one of the VISIBLE subtools. When I tried to save out the subtool, in question, I knew it was wrong, instantly, as the file was only 1KB in size. Thinking the 3D export plugin had not enjoyed my tweaking I resolved to shut down and start again. I saved, closed and reopened. On trying to open the last save almost all of the content of my job was missing; just one tool for one of the five figures was there, no combined heads, no accessories, NOTHING. I went back to the save I’d done two hours ago and it was the same story, one tool and nothing else. I went back four hours; the same. Six hours back, the same. Eight hours back, the same. Ten hours, twelve hours, the start of the day, all the same. The quicksave files had thumbnails of what I’d been working on – a crown, the hair of one character, a hat, a face, the dynameshed neck subtraction, everything looked as it did when I worked on it through out the day but when I try to open those quicksave files NOTHING but the lone tool. What the hell has happened? What can I do? If I clean install will that help? I’m seriously thinking of throwing the towel in and getting 3D Coat just so I can get working again. I love ZBrush but this is insane. I sent the last two saves of the day to a colleague. He opened them and despite their 2GB size they contained a single tool of one character, they SHOULD have had all the heads combined and decimated.
I have now worked my ass off for an entire week with literally nothing to show for what I’ve done. Any help gratefully received.
My Rig:
16 Cores (water cooled 3.0GHZ overclocked to 3.42GHZ)
32GB Ram
Nvidia GTX 980 GPU
250GB SSD OS Drive
120GB SSD Scratch Drive
3TB Raid Storage Drive
So I don’t think the issue is lack of resources!
