characteristica of ZB is that you can subdivide your mesh, say 5-7 time (*4 all quads each time) this gives you a ridiculous amount of over 1 million, or 4 million quads to work with. ZB is designed to handle that amount. unlike in maya or any other 3D pakage you can make modifications on each level of detail and jump to lower/higher detail and back again.

you will never loose your modifications on any level of detail!

infact it´s very part of your workflow to jump back and forth between levels of detail. in the end, when you have a superduper high resolution model, just export the basic mesh and create a displacement map out of the hiRes version. import to maya and render your obj in no time.