Subtitles of the Movie

In this movie, we're going to be discussing some of the preferences to set in ZBrush. You look up at the top here, we've got the Preferences menu. What we're going to be primarily looking at is memory and performance. Okay, we're all tweakers. I realize this. And I was a tweaker, too. A tweaker is a person that goes in here and ramps these things way up and then finds out later it's very bad. So, instead of covering what the perfect setting is, for your machine, my machine, whatever, I'm going to say what not to do, and it works out better this way. All right. So, the compact memory, I have 4 gigs of RAM. Would I ever set my compact memory to 4 gigs of RAM? Never. In fact, this is what I recommend. Don't ever go over 1 gig if you have 4 gigs of RAM, and lower will not hurt it at all. You're not going to see that big of a change between 1 gig of compact memory to 256 megabytes of compact memory. It might compact memory more often, but it will actually compact memory very fast at 256 megs, so maybe one-quarter of your actual memory should be compact memory. Document undos. Stick with 4. If you want more, fine, but just know that it takes up more memory. Six or eight can take up twice as much memory, twice as much hard drive space also. So, Document undos and Tool undos are too different things. One, you know, anything that I drop to the canvas becomes an undo, and the other one is any 3D object. This one could double that. So, document undo might be you know, one, two, or more gigs more than the actual tool undo, because tools can hold a lot of information. So be careful ramping this up. MaxPolyPerMesh. Okay, this is how many polygons that your machine can handle at once. This is not going to be determined until you actually go in there and divide it a few times. You're probably going to divide it to a million and it's going to say you can't divide it any further. Well, my recommendation there is ramp this up just a little bit, divide it one more time, see you're your system runs, but never, never go any higher than like 18. I wouldn't. Because 18 is probably 35 million polys. HD geometry. We'll not be getting into this. It's very high, high-res geometry and it dwarfs my machine with video capture so I can't use it. And if you want to get a sense of that compact now, you can hit compact now and you're not going to see much change, it's just going to very quickly and efficiently take all your memory and clean it out. Okay. In the next section of this movie we're going to take and look at performance issues and how to track this.