I just want follow up on Bullet and Ricks earlier chat on the use of zbrush.

You'll find that its really still very much so common place to build a mesh in Maya etc first. You can generally consider these meshes as your primary/renderable object whether its an organic or a hardsurface model. The use of zbrush, is really mainly used to add those extra details, the detail stuff that makes the model 'pop' at the end and look damn sexy!! Rarely if not at all would an object be created and used out of here, the same applys with mudbox.

However in some cases a hi res models in zbrush are used as a final hi res mesh, this is more practical with characters because displacements just dont work on objects with lots of movement so now the detail is on the mesh, a normal map may be used though just to enhance the look. But lets not forget a low to medium version would be used for animation until render time...

Anyway lets not creep to far off topic...slaps wrist

Jay