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ZB repeatably crashing during smooth tool draws at high resolution

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Heres whats happening. I have constructed a scene of 3 layers with 3 markers, and divided the components into 5 or 6 tools. My work file is fine, everything draws fine with the markers…smooth or unsmoothed (quick edit mode off or on).

When I enlarge the file to the dimensions Ill need for print, and to overcome ZBs anti-aliasing shortcomings, zb immediately crashes when I use the markers to draw smooth (quick edit mode off) placements of some of the tools for final render. It doesnt matter if I hit the draw marker with quick edit mode already turned off, or use the marker to place the tool in quick edit mode, then try to turn off quick edit when the tool is in edit mode. It doesnt matter what subd level the tool is saved as, or placed on the canvas as when the smoothing is applied…as soon as quick edit mode is turned off, zb crashes.

It would be easy to dismiss this as a ram deficiency, but things make me think bug, related to the marker draw function, or vid card issue. I can draw the same tool freehand, at high subd level, then scale it up in edit mode, manually place it and turn off quick edit mode( even at the highest resolution in “preview” render mode) without it crashing. Its only when I try to place the smooth tool with the marker, or try to smooth it after just having placed it with the marker.

Less demanding render modes dont make a difference. Ive divided the offending tools into smaller meshes, but it still crashes. My machine is far from some beast of a workstation, but it really should be adequate to the task, by any reasonable expectation. But I certainly could be doing something wrong too.

Heres the text of one of the error reports generated at crash time during the incidents:

[Edit] I deleted all that text…on review it seems it wasnt the pertitnent information on the error and the addresses it was occurring at. I cant seem to locate that part of the ms error report in the temp file during the occurence. I mean, I can view it all in the error report dialogue, but I cant seem to retrieve it. If anyone could tell me an efficient way to retrieve that info, id be happy to send it to them =)

Here are my system specs:

OS Name Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition
Version 5.1.2600 Service Pack 2 Build 2600
OS Manufacturer Microsoft Corporation
MBd: A8V Deluxe socket 939 K8T800pro
System Type X86-based PC
Processor AMD athlon 64 3500+ x86 Family 15 Model 15 Stepping 0 AuthenticAMD ~2202 Mhz
BIOS Version/Date American Megatrends Inc. 1005.027, 6/17/2004
SMBIOS Version 2.3
Windows Directory C:\WINDOWS
System Directory C:\WINDOWS\system32
2 Gigs Corsair Dual channel xms 400 ram
Boot Device \Device\HarddiskVolume1
Hardware Abstraction Layer Version = “5.1.2600.2180 (xpsp_sp2_rtm.040803-2158)”
GPU: 256mb Geforce 6800 GT ( running nvidia 66.93 drivers)
2 Gigs Corsair Dual channel xms 400 ram
Total Physical Memory 2,048.00 MB
Available Physical Memory 1.69 GB
Total Virtual Memory 2.00 GB
Available Virtual Memory 1.96 GB
Page File Space 5.85 GB
Page File C:\pagefile.sys

and just on a whim, here is a list of the shared resources. No conflicts are reported, but some of the memory addresses are shared, and the GPU shares some ports. Maybe someone smarter than me could tell me if any of these could generate instabilities during memory intensive operations.

Resource Device
I/O Port 0x00000000-0x00000CF7 PCI bus
I/O Port 0x00000000-0x00000CF7 Direct memory access controller

I/O Port 0x000003C0-0x000003DF VIA CPU to AGP2.0/AGP3.0 Controller
I/O Port 0x000003C0-0x000003DF NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT

IRQ 21 VIA Rev 5 or later USB Universal Host Controller
IRQ 21 VIA Rev 5 or later USB Universal Host Controller
IRQ 21 VIA Rev 5 or later USB Universal Host Controller
IRQ 21 VIA Rev 5 or later USB Universal Host Controller
IRQ 21 Standard Enhanced PCI to USB Host Controller

IRQ 16 NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT
IRQ 16 VIA OHCI Compliant IEEE 1394 Host Controller
IRQ 16 OHCI Compliant IEEE 1394 Host Controller

IRQ 17 Marvell Yukon Gigabit Ethernet 10/100/1000Base-T Adapter, Copper RJ-45
IRQ 17 SoftV92 Data Fax Modem

Memory Address 0xE0000000-0xF8FFFFFF VIA CPU to AGP2.0/AGP3.0 Controller
Memory Address 0xE0000000-0xF8FFFFFF NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT

Memory Address 0xA0000-0xBFFFF PCI bus
Memory Address 0xA0000-0xBFFFF VIA CPU to AGP2.0/AGP3.0 Controller
Memory Address 0xA0000-0xBFFFF NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT

I/O Port 0x000003B0-0x000003BB VIA CPU to AGP2.0/AGP3.0 Controller
I/O Port 0x000003B0-0x000003BB NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT

I love ZB. It has been literally life changing for me…Im ready to dedicate the coming months to exploring it . I think there is genius level development behind it. I think it may be the silver bullet for 3d print illustration and design graphics…or at least, its painfully close to being a silver bullet. Because of its unique philosophy of image engineering (which I had a hard time warming to, but now am completely enamored with) its hard to see it as ever being more than a novelty ( commercially speaking) as animation solution , though an invaluable part of any work flow to be sure ( but who knows…ZB excells at defying expectations).

So I would just implore ZB not to forsake those of us who need print quality images to make our money . I really need a bit better stability at high resolution, larger image output and/or better AA, and better transparency export options for external compositing. For those things Id be willing to to pay twice as much for ZB, even before any of the new announced features see the light of day. (luminous polys would be really great too, but thats for another thread ; ).

Any ideas are appreciated,
Cheers

#2

Out of curiosity, what is the size of your document?

#3

I started having trouble rendering out for wallpaper size 2346 x 1757, which was to be able to reduce by half, along with a little excess for cropping, to get to a quality 1024x768. I then thought maybe using off-factor dimensions was an issue, so I changed it to 3072x2304…no luck.

From there Ive just been working angry, and I maxed the width all the way to
4096, so I could run tests and find out what my limitations were, and what I could get away with in the future.

#4

does it crash crash or seemingly take forever and you assume crash?

i ask cuz with 2 gigs of ram you should have enuf to do what you want…but i have noticed the higher the texture size + whatever else you have going on…number of tools and their respective poly sizes etc will effectively slow down a system.

Heck I have 4 gigs now and zb starts writing to vm way too soon and while it doesn’t have too many slow down problems I do get way too many out of mem errors when I still have 2048 showing as left over…which I don’t get but someone said mem will be addressed in next release and since old computer hung up when I sneezed I am quite pleased now :smiley: but only for the moment.

on another note…someone wrote an interesting reply to another thread about the way windows handles memory too and have to say after reading it I am pissed, disappointed, and still trying to figure out how to work xp out to my advantage and not the computer and software suppliers advantage. ughhhhhhhhh

perhaps time to check out linux hahahaa

#5

No, its an immediate crash. “Zbrush has encountered an problem and needs to close…to send a report, blah , blah…”

Im perfectly willing to Blame Win XP for the problems. Ive been having problems working at high resolution across many different applications ever since win xp became the OS du jour. I mean, I used to render out full page 300 dpi images years ago, on win 98, with less advanced software than zb, and far less Ram (512mb), albeit with days of render time, sometimes.

I dont think Win XP handles Ram very well, or not large amounts of it. Ive been contemplating downgrading to win2k, as that is by all accounts the 3d os of choice for the pc, and more streamlined than xp, or switching over to Win XP pro, so I can flip the 3 gig switch in the boot.ini file and see if that reall makes a difference. Although thats risky, and MS is abandoning support for 2k shortly.

And frankly Im relectant to make any OS change with the impending release of the official win xp pro 64 bit edition, which even if 32 bit applications see no measurable spped difference, should still handle memory, and large memory operations far better, and be more stable in memory intensive situations. I downloaded the release canidate 1 that ms just posted, and I hear good things about the OS itself, but Im too afraid to give it a try, because I dont feel like begging after drivers all over creation.

If Pixologic wants to give me a seperate testing license, Id be happy to run my second drive under the 1289 64 bit build, and put z through its paces =).
In the meantime I guess Ill toss another gig of ram in there and hope that helps… Id put another 2 gigs in, but those dual channel pairs are expensive, and Im not even sure the ram that I have is being used well enough.

#6

Heres the image in question. Its just a quick throw away thing I did to show an employer the vastly increased efficiency Z gives me for 3d conceptual design graphics, which I do a lot of. I did it ostensibly in less than a day ( my technical issues withstanding. It would have taken me 3 times as long going normally and ending up in an animation package.

When I first got Z, I knew right a way what a great addition to my workflow it was…but it took me quite a while to warm to it as an end solution as well. It just lets me focus more on artistry and expression, and less on all the niggling, prohibitive restrictions that come with working at print size normally. (BTW, it occured to me as I was cropping this in pshop, how cool it would be if Z exported actual floating point HDR formats, so the HDR data could be tweaked localy or in HDR shop or something like that…add that to the wish list ;))

Which I why I hope that Z will not be like so many other 3d apps, which I frankly feel, have given the shaft to the 3d print artist, by failing to develop and adequately test for hi res print output. It can become a 3D adobe photoshop, which I would pay just silly amounts of money for, if it were reliable.

At any rate, I sold some organs and shelled out for another couple gigs of ram today, though i still think its a bug or a hardware/OS issue. When I get it in, and after I get done with some work here, I think Im going to put the windows 64 bit through the paces, and Ill let everyone know how ZB fares.

Cheers

#7

Just to follow up, for whatever its worth, I took a closer look, trying to find a commonality to the “crashy” tools. While Z did become markedly less stable the larger the document size got, the tools that consistently crashed immediately when trying to do a smooth draw with the markers, all had some pretty small mesh components, like little screws and the like, that had become very dense through the various subd levels.

In retrospect, it would have been better to do the small detail pieces as seperate tools that I went around and positioned individually, as much as a pain as that would have been. This is probably not news to you long time users. Its still odd that I only had the problem using the markers, and not with freehand draws and transformations in edit mode.

Cheers

#8

Thanks for that additional info. We’ll be looking into this.

#9

If anyone is even remotely interested, I installed the 2 additional gigs of ram for a total of 4…though win xp seems to have an issue with recognizing more than 3.25 gig of ram when all the slots are maxed out, because it starts reserving memory for some system devices…hopefully this will be fixed when i go to win xp 64.

The crashes still occurred as before. So it seems fair to rule out any sort of ram deficiency. Im left with either a deficiency in the way xp handles ram, a software issue, or some sort of vid card instability, or some sort of nifty grab bag of bad PC mojo.

#10

Hmm, i read this thread now and i think that maybe you should give Win2003 a try as it’s a server OS. It should have better memory management than XP Pro does and it should also be generally faster. It’s worth a shot until they make a ZB2 that works in Linux :slight_smile:

#11

I was thinking about giving that a try, till i checked the pricing on it. To get a version that gives me enough memory support, its just too expensive for something that Id abandon in the next few months …especially with Win XP 64 retail now being very close. Release canidate 1 has been availiable to closed beta for a few weeks now, and should be availiable for the CPP any day now. Ill hold out for that, as its where I want to be anyways.

#12

Hi bingo

haha in a way i am glad you still have the problem even after the ram. as it tells me it’s not my machine but xp or zbrush or both. leaning more towards xp though.

I notice alot of programs can’t or don’t recognize 4 gigs of ram…frustrating to say the least.

Am curious about that 3gig switch you mentioned, any info or a link on that would be appreciated. Its not a video card thing either i don’t think cuz i got a 256 pci express radeon x800xt or whatever it the numbers are and it works flawlessly in any app…fast too.

am trying to find an article i read on xp before i had it on ways to get it to manage memory better…damn i wish i had saved it.

my biggest problem with z right now is it crashing completely even tho it states i still have 1.5 to 2048 gigs left when using smooth from deformation palette on anything over 1 million polys. grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

#13

Did you set in Preference Panel>Mem>1.5GB DRAM?
ZB2 as default comes witha value of 256MB RAM and for better work you have to set very nearly your RAM available.
Your PC look great¡
Andreseloy

#14

Yes Andreseloy, my compact mem slider is set at 1700 normally, and I did quite a bit of experimenting with it…reducing it, maxing it out. (interestingly, maxing the slider out does not prevent ZB from ever writing to virtual memory).

Aminuts, the 3 Gig switch is a command you can enter into the boot.ini file in Win XP pro, (not xphome!) or the various server OSs to supposedly allow windows to use more than 2 gig of ram per process, if you have 2 gigs of Ram or more on your machine. Computers with less will not benefit. Its not something that should be messed around with unless you feel confident with what your doing, and have probably an extra computer and a couple extra hard disks around to help you fix something if it goes wrong. For instance, I have read, if not all the devices on your computer are 100% windows compliant, a drive altered thusly will not boot at all, and will require some drive juggling to fix.

Here is a decent link on the 3 gig switch. There is also more info availiable through MS:

http://www.eyeonline.com/Web/EyeonWeb/Support/TechFAQ.aspx

However, since I cheaped out on the OS and only picked up xp home, I cant test this. It also seems not something not worth messing with, with XP64 so close. Thats the whole point behind the 64 bit environent…being able to handle huge amounts of memory with speed and stability. I hoping that the 64 bit OS will let me solve my multi-application high resolution problems, especially once developers start optimizing for 64 bit.

Cheers

Scott

#15

cool thanks for the info…i do have xp pro but I will research it a bit more and make sure i have an os on second drive if I decide to check it out.:smiley:

#16

Well I read up on the 3gb switch…am gonna try it this weekend when I have time to back up everything just in case but after reading MS sites and some other tips from folks I feel pretty confident about giving it a go.

Somethings I learned that might be useful…

  1. create two instances of the command to load…one without the switch…which should be first and then a second one with the switch… this way if for some reason it doesn’t work…you can turn off the computer and restart and still be able to load up without.

  2. Make sure you have XP pro sp2 (it won’t work in home or the multimedia one) otherwise you are going to have problems and have to find their patch in order to get it to work. This will require you to call them and probably pay out your nose for it, just to get a patch they should have available on their website. But be smart and download sp2 and save your dimes.

  3. Check your graphics card’s website and see if there have been any problems and what their fix for it is. Chances are if your card is newer there won’t be any conflicts…however you might also have to include the /userva switch MS recommends trying /userva=2944 to allow room for any pte’s your card creates.

Other than that there shouldn’t be any problems but Murphy does rule the world…eg if anything can go wrong it probably will so if you are going to try it…back up everything!!

will let ya know how it goes…hahaha if I don’t kill my computer that is!:wink:

#17

Any Info?

#18

Cant speak for Aminuts, but last week MS made Release canidate 1 of winxp64 pro (build 1289) publically availiable. Alas I found out that Wacom wont be releasing any drivers for their tablets untill the OS goes retail ( all wacom users please send wacom support bitchy emails), so thats a deal breaker for me. I cant live without my wacom.

Though with dual opterons, as I see from your other thread, you should also be able to run the Win 64 os, in which memory handling will be vastly superior to current xp, regardless of the 3 gig switch. Though I havent had the time to go back and check over everything, Im ready to chalk the problem I was having originally up to mesh corruptions of the sort that were detailed in this thread :

http://www.zbrushcentral.com/zbc/showthread.php?t=23331

…as Ive been able to recreate the crashing problem with meshes that I caught develping those flaws and flyaways. The only thing that I havent reconciled yet, is why it only crashed me at higher resolutions in the original file. That still implies something ram related.