ZBrushCentral

ZBug . . .

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

ZBrush has some unacceptable bugs…they crash the application and you lose your work…its annoying…

Some examples…Crash on save, sometimes it crashes when I start to work very fast (seems a GUI bug because the application continues working apparently but no command respond, no keyboard, no mouse…), I change the brush but when I brush over the mesh it brushes with the previously selected brush, I need to Undo and then brush again for the selected brush to work…and more perhaps…

The bad thing is that they are frequent bugs. I cant believe ZBrush was launched with all these bugs, even after lots of beta testing . . . why weren’t they corrected? Did the programming team just ignored them or didn’t the beta testers find these?

Why to pick a good artist to be a beta tester? If one is a good artist it doesn’t mean he is good at finding bugs…

#2

You should post your computer specifications (OS, hard drive, RAM, video card, etc.) and your ZBrush Preferences settings, especially those under “mem”. Maybe the crashes are related to something aside from bugs. ZBrush only crashes on my end when I’m simply pushing it’s limits too far. Under a normal workflow, it’s very stable for me. When I had my settings set to stressful for my old system, I had crashes AND corrupted models that couldn’t be opened after saving. While there are few nasty known bugs, the crashing and things you’ve mentioned sound more like a settings or hardware issue.

#3

Ok, my specs:
Windows XP SP3
Processor E2200 (2.2GHz, DualCore)
4GB RAM 667 MHz
Samsung HDD 320 GB
GeForce 8600GT (512MB RAM, 500 MHz)

In my ZBrush preferences everything is default but AutoCompactMem which is 3150.

#4

While I’m not the guy to answer any technical questions, you should still post your Preferences>Mem settings. Even if you think they’re default, you may have bumped something around. Your undo settings, and your RAM usage settings can screw a lot of stuff up.

XP 32 or 64 bit? With 4 gigs, you can bump up the RAM usage to 2000 with 32 bit and a past that with 64 bit OS. That might help if you’re only dedicating half a gig of RAM to ZBrush under the default settings. I’m on ZBrushOSX and just upgraded to 6 GB of RAM, which means I can dedicate a full 4 gigs of RAM to ZB, and it’s MUCH less choppy. You have to leave RAM for your OS and background apps even with a 64 bit OS, so don’t set it too high. That can cause even more problems. Good luck!

#5

While there are bugs in Zbrush, these are more to do with features, not stability in the general application from my experiance. You say these are frequent bugs, I dont doubt you, but can you give me some posts that indicate this?

Sounds like you may have other issues, as iv not seen enougth of such stability problems for it to be a bug.

When you save your model, do you mean saving the tool or the obj? In the case of saving the tool do you save it at its lowest sub d level? When exporting the obj, what polycount does this have?

Is your system overclocked, do you run other applications. Is your Mem setup in Zbrush corectly.

Iv had stability problems and they where down to these on my syste,.

1: corrupt installof Zbrush.
2: Windows had too many resorces used in background.
3: System overclocked without enougth voltage.
4: System over heating.
5: Gfx card drivers corupt or needed updating.
6: HD too full, :cry:
7: Trying to interupt a process before its finnished = app freeze.
8: Thinking it was frozen, needed to wait longer.

Im not saying these are your problems, but it mite pay to look at them before asuming its a bug. Last time I have a crash in Zbrush was about 4 months ago. Other bugs that im aware of iv had to create work arounds till they get fixed.

Good luck.

#6

When you’re saving, are you pressing Ctrl+S or are you actually clicking the Tool>Save As (or better yet, SubTool Master’s Save) button? There is a known issue with Ctrl+S that’s easily avoided by clicking the save button. You can even put either save button (the one from the Tool palette or the one from SubTool Master onto your shelf for super easy access.

#7

My Windows is 32 Bit.

tez, I dont have any of the problems you cited.

aurick, thanks for that tip, but these bugs should be corrected, I think they are very stupid bugs that Pixologic should have already corrected.

Well, I think I need to learn to live with this by now…I’ve lost more work in ZBrush in 2 weeks than in 3dsmax in 5 years…

#8

Im no expert on bugs, or programming, but it seems your problem is a bit deeper that just Zbrush bugs, wouldnt the majority have the same issues? It sounds rather bad what your getting. If this was that bug ridden then this tool wouldnt be used in peoples pipelines, just my perspective on it.

Iv been using Zbrush constantly for the last 4 days in a row 6-7hours in each session, iv had 2 crashes. I wouldnt be happy if Zbrush was that sensitive for me

#9

I agree…but I really get some frequent zbugs. is it my hardware then? Well, quite dont see I’ll find a solution for these…I’m learning to live with them anyway :wink:

#10

Aurick may be better to answer this, but as far as i remember windows xp 32 bit can only recognize a max of 3 gigs of memory. A compact mem size of 3150 would be over what the OS can even recognize. That may be a problem. I always read here that for 3 gigs of mem, the best setting would be 2000 or 2500 for your compact mem setting. Hopefully that will work for you.

#11

hm thanks. I’ll try that setting next time.