Thank you very much!!! This is a great help! I am thinking of switching to Linux but I need to be sure zbrush works perfectly as I am professional and this is essential.
Hello everyone, again! I’m happy to say I found how to make DecimationMaster work. Just go to Preferences → Decimation Master and check “Use DLL”. That’s it 
Ok, my short advice is:
- Use multiple storage disks for dual boot (keep things simple)
- Install Linux last
- Backup your system when it works and keep making backups with history
- timeshift for Linux system (not user files)
- Keep your user files where you can access them from both systems
If you follow the above guidelines you should be safe as you try, learn and eventually become a power user
Hello, i have managed to install Zbrush on Rocky linux (cent os derivative) with lutris and latest wine version, and it works fully, i didn’t notice any broken features. My xp pen tablet works great as well.
However, i have one major problem. The time to open is ridiculous, ~5-7 minutes. When i was on windows zbrush would open in seconds.
Does anyone know how to fix it?
Hi @Romanovixh. It take about 20 seconds on my config with ZBrush 2021.7 (RAID with four SSD:s optimized for performance, but not remarkably fast - not even PCIE). Obviously you have a problem. Sorry, I have no idea what exact setup you have and can not solve your issue.
However, the latest version 2022.0.2 does not launch at all. I have not tried to figure out what is wrong.
You will need to identify why your reading time is slow or maybe stopped. Try running through a console if possible and read any error messages or warnings. I do not think it take 5-7 minutes to read ZBrush. It sounds like it is waiting for something until finally giving up. Not sure at all. Probably you will find out eventually.
Or just keep waiting for someone else who has the same issue and a solution.
Maybe do a performace test of your reading speed from the partition or network device you have your home directory in. This is the default place for Wine.
For the sake of installing ZBrush on GNU/Linux machines in a simple and quick manner, I created a git repository holding Lutris installation script(s) for the current, and possibly also future versions of the program.
It will, more or less, automate the installation process. More, because most of the Wine-related stuff will be dealt with automatically. Less, because I didn’t find a way to run ZBrush installer in a silent mode, so it will, at a certain point, require user interaction. Typical for Windows software. If you know a way to circumvent this and run the installer in a silent mode, then please do let me know. Preferably in GitHub issues section, as I’m not a frequent patron of these forums.
Happy sculpting.
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I recently installed zbrush on fedora and i am getting this wierd issue with my wacom tab that when i try to sculpt it scupt to other place to.
As i am new to this community it does not allow me to upload so i am sharing reddit post of my issue.
Hi @satyam_mishra. After checking your video I can recall seeing a similar issue myself, but that was really long ago (probably more than a year). It did not happen as frequent as for you, however I noticed while sculpting that suddenly the pointer would “jump” to another position and there will be a straight line from the initial position to the new point. This happened rarely, but in your case it seem to happen with every stroke.
The good news is that there is a solution. I do not have that issue at all.
The bad part is that first, I do not have any specific quide for how to get rid of the issue. As you wrote yourself the issue did not happen with Ubuntu. Neither does it (seem to) happen with Debian11. I think it happened with CentOS 7 (similar to Fedora) and I know it was possible to get rid of it, but sorry I do not remember what the cause or the solution could be.
If I ever could remember a solution I would share that, and unfortunately I can not find any notes about this issue. My advice is to play around with changing whatever you can think of and try to see if there is a change. You can especially adjust the window (for example full screen, not full screen etc). Good luck!
.@THINKIT , Thank you for the reply , I have tried many thing but it did not work. So I am currently using it in windows VM.
When you remember the solution pls tell as VM feels a lot slower.
@satyam_mishra Out of curiosity, when you are using the vm do you do a “passthrough” of your wacom tablet to it? If not, you probably should try it out.
It will be very hard to give you a description of how to solve the issue, because for this kind of support you first would need to recreate the issue and then test what works.
For now I just have a few memories. One thing I was thinking of is that I have a vague memory that with CentOS7 I was not supposed to install everything with ZBrush. It could have been some “fix visual C++” or similar that comes with ZBrush.
I am sure there was something that was not supposed to be installed because then it was not possible to fix things, and maybe it was that issue, but as mentioned this is really crappy free community support because it is not done the right way.
However, if you want to try you probably will need to remove and reinstall your entire Wine (or maybe try with prefix). Then install Zbrush (only) but avoid those additional packages (vcredist.exe and everything after the initial installation). See if there is any difference.
As a side note, I have been troubleshooting VNC-setups a lot in the past and this could be related with that. I have no idea at the moment.
@thinkit, I did passthrough my wacom so everything is fine in vm except some lag which maybe due to my less core available in vm.
The solution you gave is time consuming so I’ll try this when I am free. Anyways thanks for the help. I’ll reply once I am done trying this.
@satyam_mishra Just keep in mind it is simply a suggestion and not yet a solution. Another question would be why you want or need Fedora?
Edit: I found out that I could run RenderMan without RedHat and so I went with Debian11 eventually, and everything works better. This is just my experience. For sure I have tried a bunch of different distros, just so you know. In my setup I need renderman, houdini, zbrush, backups, turbovnc, wacom, wine, virtualgl, surface-kernel, stability and a few more things. It just works sweet with Debian11 and if it is not broken, I’m not trying to fix it.
@thinkit , I wanted a distro with bleeding-edge but was not ready for arch based distro as I saw on Reddit people complaining about how it can frequently break. So I got a suggestion to use fedora. Also as many softwares distribute rpm packages so thought to give it a try.
Except zbrush it runs fine. So not a very big issue but I use zbrush so was expecting to get it running in wine with much more performance loss compare to VM
Ok, when people are suggesting things it seems to me that sometimes their advice is based on their own need or personal experience based on that need and not some absolute truth or universal solution for all. For RPM i think there is RedHat, Fedora, Centos and Rocky (and maybe SUSE?). I think I used “alien” to convert RPM to .deb and it worked with RenderMan.
At this moment I just fired up ZBrush to check how the Wacom is behaving. There is one issue still with Wine-ZBrush-TurboVNC, and that is if I maximize the ZBrush window to full screen the wacom pressure is not working in that mode. However with full size window it works properly. Also, with dual screens added to vnc the tablet mapping get confused (because the two screens do not have exactly the same proportions). It is possible to fix with scripting that maps the tablet and also set both screens to the exact same resolution. At this time I mostly use Houdini and only occasionally ZBrush, but is seem to still work as expected if I disable one screen (when running through a network).!
Now I troubleshoot Houdini kinefx rigging and not Wine-ZBrush, so it is nice when other people keep this interest updated.
@thinkit Ok I know what you mean by that I was using Ubuntu before and there everything was working fine expect for the crappy distro itself. So I turned to Reddit for suggestion and as I said I wanted something bleeding edge with less headache as I play games occasionally.
And I’ll say that if I do not have to use zbrush and photoshop fedora gave me least trouble. As while installing nvidia driver in Ubuntu it was the biggest problem. I had to waste my entire day just to update. Because of which I stopped updating my nvidia driver. In fedora it is just a click in software center and it does all the work.
One of my later projects is a penguin rig (but I forgot to show that disgusting tongue). Doing something basic like this is no problem with Wine-ZBrush (i.e. after you set it up right). I did send the model back and forward to Houdini while fixing the topology.
Ok, to me “wasting an entire day” is nothing. If you want things working out of the box I’d say Windows or OSX is the way to go. Otherwise, as you already do, you can run a Windows VM and try to optimize that with CPU+RAM+fast storage. Doing dual-boot is rather simple also. For that you simply need another storage or partition (and 60-120 GB goes a long way for only a system).
Linux is all about being free and able to customize, but you are also responsible. You should expect more or less troubleshooting if you want anything that is not simply a simple install-configure-and-go thing.
Wine, and also Wine ZBrush will likely waste a lot of your time. If you have to focus on other things I’m not sure Linux is a good idea at all. Maybe dual-boot or VM:s would work for you, but in any case you will loose not only a day, but problably much more when you run into issues.
Maybe I should mention that since I now know a couple of things about Linux it is part of may day-job to use it and help others with it. I get better paid doing that than freelancing in the animation industry. So for me it is not really any waste of time. If you want better performance there is also a “workstation” version of Windows, but I have not tried that. Also you can just add better hardware and your Windows will be fast enough. I’m honest with you if your main concern is to save your time.
Just another thing any distro or software that is “bleeding-edge” (and also community based) is not likely to be fully tested. What people write in forums, no matter their good intentions, is not always reliable. The fact is usually so that you do not know that it will work until you tested it (and preferably a longer time) in your context. What Windows and OS X does it that it takes control of your entire context to make sure things work.
Cheers/Hat off
@thinkit I understand what you mean and also I am fairly new in Linux community so I am learning things. I was having issues with Windows before that was one of the reason I switched to linux also I am learning things here slowly.
Also I was just saying that for nvidia driver update I needed less problems as every single time I used to update in Ubuntu it used to break the drivers.
As for bleeding-edge I needed for gaming and not knowing much about linux I turned to fedora.
As for problems in Linux I am well aware of what I am getting into and was ready to solve them.
Do you know any alternative to zbrush which I can use, and that is not blender and available for linux.
Once you know how to do things with Linux, you start to feel a lot of freedom. However, the path there is quite geeky, troublesome and require time.
I guess what happened was that you updated the kernel. Your nvidia drivers can automatically update with that, but if the prerequisites are not met you have to update manually. However you can always run Linux in a previous kernel (there is a list when you boot).
Here are some notes for Debian 11 regarding the nvidia drivers and related issues (I think they have some button in the installer for this but below is the “hard” way. These notes are in somewhat random order and not well checked, because these notes are just personal and not so organized. Maybe some lines are for CentOS7. However they should work well if you skip the bad parts because I have no issues with this any more. I copy pasted my notes from various places, that is why they are in a mess below. ):
add user to sudoers:
su
visudo
username ALL=(ALL) ALL
edit software center sources and add all “non-free”
sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list
append “main contrib non-free” to your sources
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt install nvidia-opencl-common
sudo apt install nvidia-driver
sudo reboot now
First download from nvidia website and run in CLI after disabling nouveau and GUI (temporarily)
Note, I think some kernel sources or headers might be needed. The following run file will tell you if something is missing.
sudo sh ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-470.57.02.run # or newer
if above fails read on
Boot into CLI.
grubby --update-kernel=ALL --args=“rd.driver.blacklist=nouveau nouveau.modeset=0”
mv /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img.bak
echo “blacklist nouveau” >> /etc/modprobe.d/nouveau-blacklist.conf
dracut /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img $(uname -r)
now you can reboot (into CLI for now)
sudo reboot now
houdini OpenCL
Debian -- Details of package nvidia-opencl-common in bookworm
sudo apt install nvidia-opencl-icd
Old notes for CentOS7
sudo yum install libglvnd-* opencl-headers ocl-icd-devel.x86_64
Well said. Having patience, alternatives and backups with history will keep you going. I think I started learing about six years ago. There are ways to speed up the learning process though. Anyway, expect issues and be flexible.
no, only blender. I tried using Blender but it is not the same feeling. ZBrush is an amazing creation. I have done ceramics in real clay and some modeling with other materials, and this is the best software because it feels like the real thing. It is much easier than traditional because there are symmetry tools.
Cheers!
@thinkit I got zbrush to work it was rather a simple solution. I had to manually adjust the zbrush window size to get rid of that jumping. As for the brush I edited the graphic>emulate virtual desktop in winecfg and now everything works fine.
Thank you for the suggestions.
So good you got a working configuration.
What I can see is that since you can configure so many aspects of a Linux system it is near impossible to say what will not work. For example, in this screenshot we see a dual screen setup over (Turbo) VNC where ZBrush is in full screen. A GoZ equivalent (Z) is working fine. The position mapping for both the stylus (nib) and the eraser (back of pen) is correct. For this I made a script that uses xsetwacom to map the wacom to either of the (local) screens and connected that to a keyboard hotkey.
In this setup I had to disable the “virtualtablet” mode (it will not work well in dual screen) and thus got the pressure mapping wrong (i.e. do not press too hard). In effect I just have to press half the amont to get the brush in full size. However I can accept that.
