Zbrush insufficent memory error! / by Xuan Prada

You have probably experienced this error a few times already, haven’t you?
It is quite common specially when you are working with huge assets.

It happened to me last week a lot of times when working with a 40 UDIM asset and trying to export a 32 bit displacement maps.
My machine couldn’t handle it and Zbrush started to giving error saying “Insufficent memory error”.

If this happens to you and don’t know how to extract your displacement maps out of Zbrush, don’t worry, this small trick could help you.

  • Execute Zbrush using your root account in Mac or Administrador account in Windows.
  • In Windows just right click on the Zbrush icon and select “run as administrator”.
  • In Mac start a terminar and logging as root.
  • Then execute Zbrush.
  • Then in Zbrush go to Preferences -> Mem and increase the Compact Memory.
  • That’s it. It should work now.
  • Unfortunately this trick only worked for me with simple displacement, but it didn’t work with vector displacement :(