Easy is the one thing it is not.
I think I understand your questions/thoughts, and I’ll try to elaborate on my workflow to give you a better perspective.
For me creating a good sculpt, human or otherwise, is about weight, balance, form, rhythm, and all that other formalist crap (before it’s about the placement of ears, nose and eyes). I’ve found that creating a boxy, low-res mesh in Maya, that includes the basic proportions, gives me greater freedom when it comes time to truly develop the form. When I sculpt, if I’m thinking about my edge-flow or predefined placement of a specific muscle, then I’m already limiting my abilities to create/change the flow of the musculature and the gesture.
There are differences between sculpting in Clay and Stone. Typically if you are going to carve a figure from Stone, you have already made a maquette for it in clay. So, think of your ZBrush mesh as the digital clay maquette for your Stone sculpture. In our case, the Stone sculpture will be the version of our model with proper edge-loops, and polygon placement. Remember, clay maquettes are created to capture the form, and gesture of a sculpt, and our digital clay maquette should do the same.
Additionally, if you need to start from landmarks for eyes, nose, ears, ext., don’t you still have to “establish” those landmarks in some other software? If you are using another mesh as reference in a different software, I would recommend taking your ZBrush mesh back into that other software to see how the two meshes differ. In ZBrush, sculpt the eyes, ears, and nose then export that mesh, import it into your other software, and compare it to your other (landmark defined) mesh. If landmark placement is off, you can then go back into ZBrush and make those changes. By taking this approach every time, you are teaching yourself where the proper placement of those landmarks should really be. Eventually, you won’t need to go back to your other software to check their accuracy.
That was a good thought, and I hope this explanation helped.
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