Hey guys! I’m sitting here following a videotutorial series and honestly, every time my digital instructor happily announces “so lets go ahead and press shift-D to subdivide this” I get nervous that my computer is going to die on me.
As it is, everything seems to run very smoothly until I subdivide up to the fourth level (5 with level zero). Around this point things start clogging up. I get occational freezes and whenever I move the camera, zoom in and out etc, there is a great chance that everything will just hang still for a couple seconds. It’s worth mentioning that at this point I’m usually around 4.5 million polygons according to Mudbox.

Unfortunately, this is roughly the level you wanna hang around in order to get some good details sculpted in (unless I’ve misunderstood something) so I’ve started worrying that my hardware simply lacks the power needed in order to work with Mudbox. Are there any workarounds in order to lessen the workload? layers, hiding polys, working tecniques such as working on separate parts at the time in order to stress the cpu less that you guys would recommend? Or is my computer simply put not good enough?

Here’s my hardware specs, this computer is roughly 4.5 years old at the moment.

Graphic card: ASUS X850 PRO PCI-E 256M GDDR3
CPU: AMD ATHLON 64 4000+ S939
Memory: KINGSTON KVR400X64C3AK2/4G
Motherboard: MSI S939 NF4 ULTRA SLI PCIE GLAN SATA2 R

I would have to add that I’ve had some bad luck with a very bad electric wiring in my last residence which led to many shortages which in turn may have damaged my computer. This is the reason I’m posting this, should my computer handle this well or are these “problems” normal?

Any help and or input is greatly appreciated, greetings Mocorn.

quote from autodesk site “it is recommended to use a card which has a minimum of 512MB of video memory and support for 32 bit texture channels.” so basically your card is really letting you down, but overall your system is a bit weak.

3Ds Max 2012+Sp2 +SAP, Vray 2.2, Photoshop CS5.1
OS - Windows 7 Pro x64 Sp1
sys1: i7 2600k (OC to 4.2GHz), 16GB 1600mhz DDR3 Ram, MSI GTX 580 (3GB) (295.51), OCZ vertex 2 120GB SSD, Wacom Intuos 3
sys2: i7 2600k (OC to 4.2GHz), 16GB 1600mhz DDR3 Ram, MSI GTX 560 (1GB) (295.51), wacom bamboo

howdy. i had the same problem with mudbox. i have a dual processor intel xeon system with a 256 mb video card. mudbox ran so slow. i upgraded my video card with a 1gb memory card. problem solved. mudbox now runs like a dream.
so i agree with the previous reply. it is more likely your video card rather than your processor.
although i also agree that your processor is a bit underpowered.
cheers

First of all, thanks for the replies.
I agree on my system specs, this setup really isn’t ideal for 3d work, however, your comment about upgrading the graphics card giving such good results gives me hope. I’ve been planning to buy an upgrade kit anyway and a graphics card isn’t involved in this kit, which essentially means that I can choose to buy the graphics card first and the rest of the upgrade once I can afford it.

With some luck that might solve my problems. After all, I have to confess that after having worked with both Zbrush and Mudbox for roughly a week on both packages right after each other, Mudbox is so more user friendly and the intuitive user interface beats Zbrush any day. The whole 2.5d vs 3d thing is confusing and after having browsed forums and watched tutorials on Zbrush, one of the things that stick out is “whatever you do, don’t drop your tool (wtf? whatever happened to the word object?) to the canvas because then you’re screwed!?

Within hours of having used Mudbox I’d made my first quite detailed model that hands down beats any anatomy models that I ever made in 3ds Max back in the day. They are totally different packages off course, but I applaud the strenght and ease of Mudbox in letting the user actually use his creativity as opposed to Zbrush where you first have to spend days just getting to know the way you manouver around the program and get it to do what you had in mind. When I had finally learned enough about Zbrush to actually use it, I was spent and had no motivation left.

Again, thanks for the input, I appreciate it dearly.
- Mocorn