Daikon Forge

Quick Summary: Pixologic ZBrush 3.1 and Process Explorer by SysInternals/Microsoft do not play well together.

There are probably a hundred and one reasons that this happens to other people : When starting up ZBrush, the program will get as far as displaying the "Initializing ZBrush" splash screen, then suddenly and without any warnings or errors simply crash to desktop and disappear.

I’ve been through this probably a hundred times or more, no kidding.  I’ve ended up calling Pixologic customer support no less than 10 times, and it’s because of this issue that I’m now permanently running Windows Vista instead of dual-booting XP.  Originally I had tried to install ZBrush in XP, but this crash happened during activation and permanently borked my XP partition’s ability to run ZBrush, and Pixologic’s support team couldn’t figure it out.  I installed on Vista, and it worked, so as I spent more and more time using Vista and getting it customized to the way I do things, it became inconvenient (and increasingly unnecessary) to switch back to XP.

Fast forward to today…  I haven’t used ZBrush in a couple of months now, so I had completely forgotten all about this issue.  Now, however, I’m working on a new weapon, and wanted to do some preliminary detail work in ZBrush, so I fired it up and… POOF!

Now ZBrush was telling me that there was a problem with my license, so I had to call Pixologic and activate over the phone.  I tried that, four times.  Each time, they’d give me a new code, I’d enter it, and CRASH!  After uninstalling my virus scanner, turning off Data Execution Prevention, re-installing the MSVC Redistributable Runtime, several machine reboots, and tossing some chicken bones (voodoo can’t hurt, right?), still no joy.

Then it hit me : I remembered having this problem quite frequently before, and I never took any notes because I was using ZBrush several times a day every day and I thought I’d never forget.  Yet I did.

For me, the problem is that I’m a software developer by trade, and all of this graphics and Second Life stuff is a hobby.  Naturally, my machine is tricked out to have a focus on software development, and as a part of that, I use a replacement Task Manager called Process Explorer by SysInternals (Which was recently bought out by the Borg Collective Microsoft).

I absolutely love Process Explorer.  It makes it very easy to track my program’s memory usage, open DLL’s and file handles, and get detailed information on heap usage and garbage collection cycles.

But it does not play well with ZBrush.  No, not at all.  I don’t know if having Process Explorer trying to hook into ZBrush’s process triggers some sort of attempt at security against copy protection, or just reveals a problem with ZBrush’s code, but I absolutely have to close Process Explorer to run ZBrush.

I seriously doubt this will be a problem for most ZBrush customers, but since I couldn’t find anything about it online (having discovered the relationship quite by accident one day), and Pixologic’s customer support personnel had never heard about it, I wanted to post about it "just in case".  At least they tried, and were helpful and professional, which is nice when you are stressed out and irritable

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And speaking of customer support…  This whole experience has reminded me that almost a year later I still have a fair amount of bitterness toward DAZ3D about having spent around $600USD on Carrara 6 Pro only to find out that not only does it not do the things I needed it to do (some of which were advertised features that convinced me to make the purchase), but that customer support is absolutely atrocious.  I cannot recall how many times I’ve looked for a customer support number (no such thing, apparently) or scoured the forums looking for an answer to a question. 

The "support" forums, as is typical with any company’s public forums, are full of opinionated assholes who commonly reply with "Use search before asking questions, noob" bullshit (even after a previous search had revealed no satisfactory answers) and frequently give cursory responses that do not solve the problem.  Here’s some news, guys : Forums != Support

Now, I’ll be honest and say that I absolutely love DAZ|Studio, and for the price it can’t be beat.  But I also feel it’s not acceptable to publicly support a company that I feel has not served my interests as a paying customer, so I have removed my page on creating Second Life animations using DAZ|Studio.  There are surely many other resources out there for learning how to use the program, so this is no loss to anyone, but I felt it needed to be said and done.