I was hoping that you guys could help a ZBrush newbie out with some advice. I just started to play around with the software and some of the information I filtered out of various tutorials got me slightly confused.

1. Modelling the Low poly mesh for an ingame object (in 3dsmax) before importing it into ZBrush to create the normal map.

BobotheSeal mentioned he didn´t worry about clippling just making the model out of a number of intersecting low poly objects instead of a continous mesh. He also uv mapped it.

Well, clipping may not matter for ZBrush, but the final low poly model should usually not have a lot of clippings, right? So does that mean he makes the high poly model first then exports it again and builds a final new low poly? But then he would need to re-uvmap it too, right?

Does this even work at all? I thought the lowest subdivision level should be identical to the low poly model for the uvmap to work.

2. Identical parts

If parts of the model are to be identical (e.g. the back and front of a box) -also in high poly- how am I to go about that?
Model only one half of it as a low poly, make the high poly and a normal map in Zbrush, export it back to 3dsmax and put together the final low poly model by mirroring the one part?

I really hope this makes sense, it´s not easy to describe

you tend to get the best results by just making the high poly any old way you fancy and then building a new low poly

as for your second question - there's nothing to be gained from modelling something twice if you don't have to. that said, mirroring normal maps is engine dependent so for the purposes of portfolio work etc I'd avoid it.

thank you for the advice.

I figure I will construct much of the high poly mesh in 3dsmax since that will give me more flexibility for the hard egdged parts and will only subdivide the more organic parts in Zbrush.

Really looking forward to teh weekend to see what final results I can come up with