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ZBrush - Wacom Intuos4 - Mac Lion OS Issue

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

I’m having some trouble getting my Wacom tablet to work with ZBrush 4R2. In the preferences, the tablet menu is grayed out so I’m assuming ZBrush isn’t seeing the tablet. The tablet still more or less works or at least the basic pressure sensitivity does. But any modifiers such as shift, command, opt, etc won’t work through any of the express keys.

I tried reinstalling the latest Wacom drivers and then completely cleaned out all wacom files to do a “fresh” install of the drivers. No luck unfortunately.

I was wondering if anyone else was experiencing the same problem or if anyone knows of a solution?

I appreciate you help on this.

  • Chip
#2

I’ not sure my problem is the same as yours but my Intuos4 tablet was very shaky in zbrush. I have a 2.53 Ghz macbook pro late 2008 that was running 4Gram. Someone posted to upgrade to 8Gram and that worked for him, however not for me. I ended up spending 3 days reverting back to SnowLeopard. It shouldn’t have taken that long but my time capsul erased all my old backups and I basically had to start over.

From what I know about the issue is that zbrush says wacom needs to do something and vice versa. maybe some day it will work but I’m back on SL and things are good. I also use Modo and Modo was acting strange on lion too.

Hope this helps.

Tony

#3

Thanks for the suggestion Tony. I worked with Pixologic support (great people, I was VERY impressed with the support effort) but wasn’t able to get it cleared up. However I found out that it was a mix of things. I ended up doing a clean install of OSX since my system really needed it done anyway. That fixed a small bit of the Wacom problem.

But a big part of it turned out to be user error/usability. While I love my Wacom pen and tablet, there are things that I don’t do with it - to be specific, I won’t use the pen to navigate to top menus in programs. I always reach over and grab the mouse. Turns out, the tablet box in the Preferences menu is only available if the pen is being actively used at that moment. Since I use the mouse on the menus, it looked like there was a problem with the tablet/ZBrush connection.

The only reason I discovered it was that my cat ran across my desk and knocked the pen out of its holder and on to the tablet at the same time I had the preferences menu open trying to figure the problem out.

#4

I’ve recently installed 4r2 on a new iMac with Lion. I’ve plugged in a new wacon intuos 4 tablet and installed the latest 6.1.7-5 driver. In ZBrush (and only ZBrush, not Modo or Maya or Photoshop or anything else) I get jittering and stuttering when using the tablet. My (microsoft) mouse works fine. I found a very helpful solution here:

http://roaringapps.com/app:1141#post-4624

It’s not a complete solution however since turning off Preferences > Performance > MultiDraw does lead to a noticeable drop in performance. It does make the tablet useable though, so I guess I’ll be turning it on and off quite a bit. I just upgraded to 4r2b tonight and nothing has changed sadly.

#5

I’ve been having the same issue with an Intuos 4 and ZBrush running on OS Lion. It’s a fairly new iMac 27" too and it just chugs around until I turn off Multidraw. Even that doesn’t properly fix the problem and I have to turn it off every time I reopen ZBrush as it doesn’t save with a normal config save. Very strange. As a side note, I also get a crash (ZScript Note: Unrecognised Command) a great deal on starting up ZBrush but it’s fine on a ‘reopen’ after that. very odd stuff.