ZB 3.2 on OS X 10.5.8

system · September 7, 2009, 10:39am

Hi everyone, despite finding the UI a struggle, I’ve found ZB to be a very powerful tool. However, I’ve been plagued with stability issues in ZB for Mac. It hangs regularly (every 20 minutes or so) when I’m doing moderately detailed sculpting with lazy mouse turned on. I’m constantly loosing work despite saving regularly. I’m running it on a unibody MacBook Pro with 4GB Ram. Performance is pretty good (in between the hangs).

Does everyone else have this experience whether on Mac or PC? Or is it just Macs? Or is it just me?

Paint_Guy · September 7, 2009, 9:19pm

Hi, I am using ZBrush 3.2 (Mac OS 10.5.8) with a Mac Pro Tower Octocore and 12 GB of ram. I have had no problems with ZBrush hanging as of yet, but I have not done a lot of really detailed work in ZBrush either. The best I can do is try to push ZBrush a little harder and see if I get the same type of crashes. I will do a test this week as I have a detailed project I am working on.

Is your computer an duocore, quadcore or octocore?

system · September 10, 2009, 9:21am

Hi Paint Guy, sorry for the delay, the mail message got shunted to my junk folder. I’m on a humble unibody MacBook Pro (which is dual core) with only 4GB ram, so maybe that’s the problem. I’ve been holding off on getting a tower until Snow Leopard, but since that’s out, I guess I have no more excuses.

Paint_Guy · September 10, 2009, 9:40am

No Problem. Hope you get a shiny new mac soon!

florencepapillon · September 10, 2009, 2:36pm

Hi, I’m using ZBrush 3.2 (Mac OS 10.6) with a Mac Pro Tower Octocore and 8 GB of ram. I’ve been using ZB on this machine (and also on a Macbook Pro 17" 4GB RAM) since 10.5.4, and crashes occurs quite often.
When I make a complex model, say around 20 millions vertices, it’s so easy to make it crash: I often complete the model with 80 or 90 incremental tools saved.
Crashes occur in several situations and most often when:

saving the tool from the highest geometry level
clearing a mask
hiding or unhiding geometry
panning too quickly the viewport (crash occurs very often if, after panning the viewport, the mouse pointer enters a panel or GUI area)
switching from an alpha to another
adaptive displacement map: crash instantly if polygon count >=18millions
rarely crash occurs pressing “tab” button, in order to hide panels

I can’t say it’s a very stable application so far, but I’ve learned to be patient and save very often, even if sometimes, when you are sculpting at 20-25mil, it’s very difficult to stop, get to lowest geometry level and save, because it takes quite some time and … well, it’s dangerous too.

I hope these stability bugs will get the proper consideration by the dev’s.
So, from my experience, it really doesn’t matter if you are using a Mac Pro or a MacBook, because the sames issues have shown on both machines.

system · September 10, 2009, 3:05pm

Thanks for that. It’s quite frustrating to see these software companies keep putting out new releases with new features while the base product still needs so much quality control. I understand that money talks and the first order of business is to expand the customer base, but somehow that doesn’t really bode well for the user, does it?

New features are cool and all, but it’s kind of pointless if you can’t really use the software.

Maybe they should do a poll to see how many users would actually pay for an upgrade that had no new features, but gave the base product rock-solid stability.

invertedNormal · September 10, 2009, 3:16pm

i’m running on a 17" unibody with 4GB here with no problem on Leopard or Snow Leopard. the only hang i’ve experienced is when ZB is compacting memory… and that doesn’t happen when interacting with the model, and it hasn’t interrupted anything i’m doing. No notable crashes either, or lost data on saves. sorry you’re having that experience. but all is well and good here.

what kind of poly counts are you talking?

florencepapillon · September 10, 2009, 3:20pm

I must tell I really love ZB and I want to thank Pixologic and all the stuff for making such a creative and fantastic product.
Said that, I must agree with the point you just made, let’s call it bug-solving vs. new features policy.
I hope Pixologic will continue working with that same committment on both aspects, it would be really a shame to see such a wonderful product downsized because of stability problems.

florencepapillon · September 10, 2009, 3:24pm

Hi invertedNormal, I experience all the listed problems when polygon count trespass 15 millions. Below that I have no recalls of crashes.