ZBrushCentral

~~ ZBrush 4 - HELP NEEDED ~~

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hey Everyone!

My name is Corey, and I’m a total noob to Zbrush (I feel that everyone deserves noob alerts), and I need some help with a few things:

Question 1 - I bought the direct download version of ZBrush, and thats literally all I got with the download… ZBrush 4, but no documentation at all… I found the “downloads” section of the pixologic website, and downloaded copies of the getting started guide, tutorials, etc, but I haven’t been able to locate a Zbrush 4.0 User Manual. Does such a Holy Grail exist?

Question 2 - I read that you can hold down the ctrl key when hovering over items to get a description of its use. This is an AMAZING feature, especially with learning what the various brushes can do… I feel like I have a glitched version though… Some of the items do display a description, and some display a generic text talking about the palette, but not the specific thing you are hovering over. Anyone else with these issues?

Question 3 - I notice some artifacts occasionally appear on my monitor when rotating sculptures… I have tried to pin down that it only does it on sculptures with higher poly counts, but I’ve even noticed it on things like a basic 3D Cube straight from the tools palette, or when rotating the shadow box. My concern is that I have a FEROCIOUS computer that should not have ANY issues handling Zbrush. I have searched in your forum on the topics of performance/memory settings, but it seems like all of the answers are for older versions of zbrush, or a different platform, and both of which typically talk about settings that I dont see at all in Zbrush 4.
I have a 2.9GHz Quad Core Xeon MacPro w/ 8GB Ram.
I currently have all of the settings set to default.
Can someone explain to me how/where/what my settings should be to get the most out of this software and my machine?

Question 4 - I have downloaded several plugins from the download center, and materials/alphas from the user submitted section, but I have no idea where to save these. I’ve tried the Zplugin folder along with a few others, but none of them seem to display the plugin in the software upon relaunch…?

Thanks in advance for the help, and again, sorry to get all noob on ya…
I’m excited to meet and share art on here in the future. Zbrushcentral seems kind of priceless for Zbrush artists - Bravo.

-Corey

#2

answers…in order.

  1. nope, most software doesn’t come with a user’s manual. We have the docs that you downloaded, and the wiki. As well as all of us here on ZBC, we’re usually happy to help.

  2. Your version is fine. Some things have hot links, some don’t

  3. Your computer isn’t really that “ferocious”, but the graphics errors you’re getting are typical, especially when you have polyframe (shift+F) turned on. You can hit ctrl+N (new document) while in edit mode (T) to clean the document and it should remove any artifacting that occurs during rotations. All of this is handled through the graphics card, which you didn’t mention. I use only quadro cards in my laptop as well as all of our systems at work and we rarely get the errors you’re talking about, but they do pop up from time to time. It’s nothing to worry about.

  4. Not sure about the MAC file structure, but this is the windows location
    C:\Program Files (x86)\Pixologic\ZBrush 4.0\ZStartup\ZPlugs

#3

Just to add to what goast666 has told you regarding question 4, the following is where you will find the downloaded and installed plugins inside of ZBrush.

ZPlugin menu:

Adjust, Decimation Master, Multi Map Exporter, 3D Print Exporter, Subtool Master, Transpose Master, UV Master.

Texture menu:

Image Plane 4.

Document menu:

ZAppLink, PaintStop.

…

Also, here is the link to the wiki. Needs updating, but most of it is still relevant.

.

#4

Thank you so much for the help guys.

Ok, so I guess that Im totally that “proud parent that puts lame honor role bumper stickers on their car”, when it comes to my computer. I feel like no one uses Macs these days… It used to be so trendy… :slight_smile:

My graphics card: ATI Radeon HD 5770

I have no idea if this is good or not… Would you recommend upgrading my graphics card to better utilize Zbrush?

Also, neither of you really touched on memory/performance settings…
Is the default setup fine for my computer? I want to get the most bang out of the multiple cpus/gbs of ram.

#5

i can answer your video card question. zbrush actually uses your cpus and memory. it relies very little on your card. i have 8 gb of memory so i set the mem on 4096. wat this does is allows zbrush to compact memory at higher memory levels. just gotta remember the more zbrush compacts memory the more down time your spending waiting for zbrush. i think ive heard others say that if you dont have that much ram use half and that should be good. hope this helped! :smiley:

#6

Regarding best Mem settings, see this post.

#7

Regarding your graphics card, no problems there. Like loki_22 said, ZBrush relies more on CPU and RAM than it does on the graphics card.