Zbrush Resolution

Elodin

Hi, I have trouble understanding, how do you work on HD characters in Zbrush. After creating several pieces of armor, amulet and other stuff (like straps), It's already 25 million polys with HD resolution (with proper leather alphas, stitches and everything). But I need more and I can add any new geometry, because my PC crashes. What should I do?

I saw a couple of works on polycount and zbrushcentral. They show HD characters with massive amounts of items on the same shot, fully detailed. Who is that possible?

cryrid

• Split your tool into subtools; each subtool can go up to your system's max (if your computer wont let you go past 8 million points, then each subtool can have 8 million points).
• This also lets you locally subdivide an area of the mesh, so that you're not exponentially wasting polygons in other areas while trying to get more detail into a leather strap
• If you're satisfied with a model and consider it final, consider compressing it a bit with decimation master
• If you're using actual HD geometry (not to be confused with high subdivision levels), then zbrush will let you render the entire mesh, provided you wait for it to calculate everything.

Elodin

Subdiving specific areas sounds like a plan.

Even so, when I reach say, 8 subtools with 8 million each, it starts lagging and crashing, horribly.

cryrid

Then you may have to save often, save in smaller pieces, and only decimate and combine if you want a fancy zbrush screenshot of the end result.

You may also want to go through the preferences and do anything you can to squeeze extra performance out of your machine. Probably start by limiting the undo history (and disable its saving), and cranking the compact mem to 4096.

jfitch

Someday soon, zbrush with be 64 bit. But if you really need more than that I would split your zbrush files up. I usually do a layout file with all of the meshes at their lowest resolution. Then I split off into organics and hard surface, or whatever makes sense for you--maybe a file for the head, a file for the clothes, etc. Because if you're adding detail to the clothes and it crashes, but the head is already done, you don't need it to be sitting in the project taking up memory, but you could have a representational mesh at a low res.

Elodin

Yes, that's what I ended up doing on this character I'm modeling.

I split into legs, arms and torso. Works much better

sogun

Simply split your model into subtools. For example I have my eagle body subtool at 21 million polys and the rest are on separate subtools: the tails and the wing feathers. Then when Z4R7 comes out maybe it will be able to handle "extended RAM", over 4GB or multi displacement map exporter will be 64-bit, like some other plugins.