zBrush tools suddenly read only as Unix Executable Files on Mac OS X.

[Fingus]

I am taking a creature design class at my school and I’m currently sculpting it in zBrush. The computers at school run Windows 7 and zBrush 3.5R, while at home I have a MacBook Pro with Snow Leopard and zBrush 3.12.

Today I took the zTool to school and worked on it a bit in class, and when I came home all the ZTL’s and ZBR’s on my thumb drive suddenly show up as “Unix Executable File” in Finder instead of Documents as they usually do. When I try to open the tools in zBrush I just get an error message saying “Error has been encountered while trying to load a Tool. Loading has been aborted.”

This is the first time I’ve brought my Tool to the school computers. II figured it might be the transition to Windows or a later version that causes it, but all of the zbrush files on my thumb drive have become Unix Executables even though I only opened one of them.

What is going on?

On the attached image you can see the Thumb drive at the bottom and on the top is my work folder with the bug3.ztl copied from the flash drive. Notice that it’s the only one that shows up as an Unix Executable.

Attachments

[Fingus]

An update.

A guy at CGTalk suggested that I try to use the the Repair File Permissions in Disk Utility. I tried that but it sadly didn’t work.

I did some research and came upon this thread at computing.net

http://www.computing.net/answers/networking/unix-executable-files/35613.html

It seems like Windows and OS X have different ways of labeling and handling extensions and executable code, so it seems that windows must have overwritten some lables or permissions in my .ztl files when it accessed them.
Response number 9 in that thread suggested to use the terminal command chmod -x * to purge the unix executable association on all the files in the selected folder. I put my .ztl in an isolated folder and ran the command, and it worked! The file is no longer an Unix Executable. It didn’t really solve my problem though as I still get the “Error has been encountered while trying to load a Tool. Loading has been aborted.” when I try to load it in zBrush…

Now what?

edit: It occured to me that it could be a version incompatability issue. As I said, I run 3.12 at home and the school has 3.5r.

Attachments

[Fingus]

Another update.

I decided to do a little experiment to see if it’s really the different versions of zBrush that screwed me over.

I found one of the earlier versions of the tool that I hadn’t opened in zBrush at school but that had been a victim to the Unix Executable File bug. I ran the chmod -x * command on it and turned it back into a normal document.

I was able to open it in zBrush. In fact, I am able to open the version that still reads as an Unix Executable File, I have no idea why I didn’t try that earlier…

So it seems obvious that the Unix Executable File tag wasn’t the problem in the first place, and that the reason I can’t open my tool is because I worked on it in a newer version of zBrush.

Damnit.

Is there a way of opening tools from a newer version of zBrush in an older version?

[marcus_civis]

I think this is a OSX thing rather than ZBrush. I used to see it a lot with earlier versions of OSX but haven’t with Snow Leopard. It is simply a way the Mac OSX labels file types that it doesn’t recognise and stuff written by Windows will fall into that category. You can ignore it as the files should still load into ZBrush without problems.

Why are you using 3.12? You should upgrade to 3.2 which you can do from the Pixologic Download Center.

And no, you can’t open new version files in older versions of ZBrush.

[Richard_Marklew]

You cannot open ztl files made in zbrush 3.5 in zbrush 3.12/3.2, that is why you are getting an error. You will have to export from 3.5 as an obj, import it into 3.2 and reconstruct subdivsion or import the lowest and highest level.

Richard