Hi @nickholl,
Are you are describing a model that has a combination of hard surface and organic shapes?
Indeed the best way to create machine-perfect shapes is to work at the lowest resolution you can. This limits the points on the surface and keeps that surface from picking up too many deviations or flaws. This kind of surface information is often desirable for an organic mesh, however.
Likewise, remeshing an organic mesh to convert it to a lower poly form will also remove much of the surface detail.
Hand-working or hand-brushing a surface at high resolution will always introduce deviations in that surface, just like working with a real piece of clay. If you have a perfectly smooth surface that has been subdivided up from lower poly geometry, you need to avoid making brush strokes on it if you want to keep it completely smooth. If you are projecting surface detail from a previous version of the mesh onto the subdivided mesh, then any dents or surface detail will also be re-projected onto it. You would need to protect areas you dont want to receive any projection with masking.
While there is no one correct workflow, the traditional ZBrush workflow can be generally summed up as follows:
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Develop the form of your mesh up to about a medium level of detail using the tools in ZBrush that only work at a single level of subdivision. These are tools like Sculptris Pro, Dynamesh, and Live Boolean, and are generally intended as tools to help rapidly shape form. They become less useful for a mesh with a stable form that you are looking to create fine detail for.
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Once your form is mostly stable and will no longer be undergoing drastic, rapid changes, at some point you want to transition to a multi-resolution mesh for the best results in creating fine detail. This is generally done by retopologizing a new low poly mesh with quality topology from your original mesh using ZRemesher or manual retopology. Then the new mesh is subdivided up from low poly so it has multiple subdivisions. If the original mesh contained surface detail that was lost in the conversion to a new low poly mesh, it can be reprojected onto it.
Contrary to what some may think, Subdivision levels are a feature, not a bug :). They are necessary to reach the highest detail potential ZBrush is capable of, and they provide fine control when sculpting detail. If you have multiple subdivision levels, then you can quickly drop to a lower level to sculpt on the mesh with lower resolution topology where it wont be as sensitive to detail. Then when you move to a higher subdivision level that detail will be smoother, and won’t have picked up as many inadvertent brush marks as it would have if you had sculpted it at the highest level of subdivision.
Likewise, having multiple subdivision levels allows you to smooth fine surface detail at the highest subdivision levels without melting the underlying form of the mesh, similar to working with very fine sandpaper. A mesh is much more susceptible to drastic changes in the form at lower subdivision levels, but will resist smoothing at higher subdivision levels.
Trying to do all this on a model at a single level of resolution is much more difficult, and requires you to use a much wider variety of brushes with specific effects. If you have a multi resolution mesh however, changing the effect of a single brush is as easy as simply working on a level of subdivision appropriate to the level of detail you are trying to achieve.
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