Certain "Homemade" matcaps make ZBrush very unstable and crash often
polycounter lvl 7
A few projects ago, I played around with ZBrush's matcaps and materials to try to create some realistic bone and teeth materials (I mainly use CT Scan data to create my sculpts of skulls and skeletons).
The first time I used them, they worked well and without issue; but now, they are almost unusable.
I van put the matcap on a sphere or other similar topology but not on my very complex skull sculpts with any certainty that they will not cause a crash.
Many of the materials I "created" are mixes of others' matcaps and sometimes one particular matcap is more "sensitive" than another (right now, on of my materials (E-Bleached Teeth 03) I can't use at all.
I have tried retopologizing and UV-ing from a Dynamesh (as the simple meshes from ZBrush are UV-ed) but there was no difference.
I have also "rebuilt" the materials to see if that would help.
Sometimes I find that a certain matcap has an issue with one of the channels (I have made some materials trishaders to get the effect I'm after.
I can't add a matcap, so I added a screencap showing the settings of all three shader channels.
I hope that someone has perhaps experienced this themselves and can help me.
Thanks in advance (and for taking the time to read this lengthy post) - plmk if there is something that I have left out that you need to know............
The first time I used them, they worked well and without issue; but now, they are almost unusable.
I van put the matcap on a sphere or other similar topology but not on my very complex skull sculpts with any certainty that they will not cause a crash.
Many of the materials I "created" are mixes of others' matcaps and sometimes one particular matcap is more "sensitive" than another (right now, on of my materials (E-Bleached Teeth 03) I can't use at all.
I have tried retopologizing and UV-ing from a Dynamesh (as the simple meshes from ZBrush are UV-ed) but there was no difference.
I have also "rebuilt" the materials to see if that would help.
Sometimes I find that a certain matcap has an issue with one of the channels (I have made some materials trishaders to get the effect I'm after.
I can't add a matcap, so I added a screencap showing the settings of all three shader channels.
I hope that someone has perhaps experienced this themselves and can help me.
Thanks in advance (and for taking the time to read this lengthy post) - plmk if there is something that I have left out that you need to know............
Replies
You could share a matcap by sticking it in a ZIP file. It might also help to share the exact version number of the ZBrush you're using, along with some info about your setup... OS, CPU, RAM, GPU.
The most problematic matcaps have been attached. I have found that framing a subtool with the matcap several times causes a crash; multiple movements (zoom, rotate mostly).
My only solution has been to have a ZBrush inclusive matcap on the subtools, do my posing/positioning (not much posing with skulls) and then putting the bone/teeth matcap back on (the teeth I put on by Fill object and the bone I leave as displaying the active material {it seems to put less stress on the issue}).
BTW; the materials will look terrible as they don't have the right light setup - but I have found the lights to make no difference with the issue so rather than complicate things by adding more variables..)
I'm currently using ZBrush 2024.0.4 (.5 I found to be very unstable); but I've also tried ZBrush 2022 & 2023 with the exact same results.
Larger subtools make the issue worse (skull sculpts, whether they be decimated from a Dynamesh subtool, or a subdivided and UV'd one make little [aka, no) difference.
I have yet to try baking the matcap into a texture map as ZB crashes before I can ever get that far.
Win 10 custom
Intel Core i7 5920K
128GB RAM DDR4
Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060
I think that covers all of your questions.
Yes, she's an older beast and I do intend to update (I think the MB and CPU are the bottleneck and a newer MB can allow for more RAM for other programs that I use for processing the raw CT scan data)...
The bigger of the two matcaps you shared also crashed for me when zooming. I was able to fix it by clearing out the surface bump texture in S3 and also set the CanvasBump scale to 1 just for good measure...it didn't look like there was any noticeable difference in the visual output.
It's somewhat of a large texture too and non square, so if you really need it, consider resizing to something like 512 or even 256 and let tiling do the work.
So, yeah (I waffle too much)
I'll give 'em a try tomorrow (it's 3:15AM here right now - the joys of insomnia).
Thanks; I will return to report - good or bad (I hate those rude pricks that never respond after you solve their problem,,, eh, autocorrect can be awesome...
Still working; trying to work out what materials I used for what effect (I take a shit-ton of notes, but there is still something I miss out).
But I will keep you updated...