Starting Zbrush from command line.

Visherac · March 26, 2019, 4:23pm

I am looking to launch Zbrush from command line (Windows 64bit) by just typing ‘zbrush.exe’. I setup the environment variable ‘path’ to point to the install directory (c:\Program Files\Pixologic\Zbrush 2018). For most software (Maya, Photoshop, Unreal…etc ) this is all you must do to launch their .exe, however Zbrush is being difficult.

After the setup above, and I type zbrush.exe, it errors out on me. gives a window stating “Unable to Open File” with message, “ZBRUSH/ZResources\Images/OpenFileZLogo2”. There are a few of these message windows all unable to Open a file.

I can get it to launch from command line if I type “c:\Program Files\Pixologic\Zbrush 2018\zbrush.exe” with the quotes. but this is hard coded per machine and not ideal. Not sure why this works but the other doesn’t.

Best,
Jason

marcus_civis · July 4, 2019, 4:39am

The only way I have been able to get this to work is by having a batch file called “ZBrush.bat” in the Pixologic folder, and setting the PATH environment variable to this folder. The batch file just has this line of code:

Start “” “C:\Program Files\Pixologic\ZBrush 2018\ZBrush.exe”

Juan_Cristobal_Quesa · April 28, 2020, 6:27pm

Hi,
I will answer since i was struggling for ZBrush 2020.1.3 through python and the command line.
Calling directly the .exe from python was causing the “unable to open file” windows…
And i tried as well to set the Pixologic Folders to the PATH env var but didnt seem to work…

So what i did is instead call the shortcut .lnk file located in C:/ProgramData…

That did the trick for me!

Hope it helps.