Hello, I’m learning ZBrush3 by doing the tutorial from the practical guide for version 2. When I use the projection master I often get this popup message “Unable to read virtual memory file”. It doesn’t affect the program, but sometimes I have to click OK several times to proceed further. I’m doing the telephone tutorial by the way and I have 3 gigs of memory on my machine. What could be the problem?
Cheers…
Same issue reported here : http://www.zbrushcentral.com/zbc/showthread.php?t=45801&highlight=unable+read+virtual . Virtual memory, of course, relates to non-ram memory. So what we really need to know is your Page File set-up. Are you using ram boost (flash memory in a usb port), how many hard drives do you have, are you using an external drive, what are your virtual memory settings (min, max, which drive or split over more than one)? Maybe run chkdsk on your drives to ensure they’re ok. Just thinking aloud … coffee hasn’t kicked in yet.
Thank you Moochie! Playing around in the memory settings in the preference palette solved the problem, but I still have a question. My setup is 2 internal drives, on the first drive I have a partition for the OS (XP professional) and my installed programs (3 gigs free), another partition (6 gigs) for the swap file of the OS, a partition(15 gigs) as a scratch disk for photoshop and the last partition is for data. Am I correct in assuming that ZBrush is using the partition on which it is installed for virtual memory and there isn’t enough space? Is there a way like in photoshop to assign a particular partition drive for virtual memory?
I’m totally new to ZBrush and slowly getting used to its quirks 
Cheers
If you look in your ZB3 folders, you’ll find one called ‘vmem’. That, unless I’m very much mistaken, is your scratch disk space. To the best of my knowledge there’s no way to alter its location, but I stand to be corrected.
I don’t understand why it comes up with the error message all the times when I try to go up to 8 millions of polygons. I have PLENTY of HDD space… and 2 giga RAM
Jester, I have the same problems.
‘Plenty of disk space’ is under ZB3 veeeeeery relative.
By working with Level 6 to 7 Models the VMem-folder increases easily up to 5-6 GB !! 
If ZB crashes and you don’t erase the files in VMem manually, your diskspace runs quickly out of limit.
An option for a manual path-setting for the VMem-folder is strongly recommended in the near future updates.
First off, ZBrush does not use your operating system’s virtual memory. So your system settings will have no effect on ZBrush’s performance. Make sure that the drive ZBrush is installed to has a good amount of free space.
Second, your Compact Mem setting should be lower than the amount of RAM in your system. Also, if you are running a 32-bit version of Windows then you should never set Compact Mem higher than 2048 regardless of how much RAM (including ReadyBoost) you might have.
Third, be careful of the MaxPolysPerMesh setting. Just because it CAN go up to 50 million doesn’t mean that it SHOULD. If your system has 2 GB of RAM I would not recommend going any higher than 10 for this setting. Trying to push it too high is the surest path to ZBrush instability.
Define instability. Are you talking about “by design” instability or stuff that wasn’t looked at as a bug but now causes problems in the release? I would think that there are better ways to warn or crash than throwing up the error message like it is. It might be better if there was a warning message that read the system resources while those settings were changed and notified the user if they were going to affect the stability of ZB.
Just some ideas for the future…
@ Aurick
Thanks for the usefull informations, but I repeat that a freely choosable path for the Vmem-folder and therefore the disk-partition for the diskspace-memory should be easily to implement into the program and gives the user all the needed flexibility.
You cannot commonly suppose that ZBrush is the only program that we use and therefore reserve (and waste) a full partition only for ZB3.
So the programmers are demanded for that issue because this should really not be any problem to include a fix for that in a near update. 
A simple path-setting in an .ini or the Windows-registry that ZB reads when it starts or uses diskspace on runtime and that’s it.
Cast my vote too for an option for the Vmem-folder path!
Please don’t blow this one off as low priority update. Everyone has their puters setup differently…MG