Small workflow Q about mech/organic for nomal map

Caravaggio

I've been searching through the forum a bit but there's such a great volume of posts about normals and zbrush and "workflow" that it seems what I'm looking for isn't just step 2 or 3 but 3.4 or 3.67 or whatever. Anyway, for all you modelers making game characters - how do you approach characters with both organic and mechanical parts? It's not hard to find examples of mechanical parts done well inside zbrush, but it just doesn't seem as intuitive to me as the precise abilities of max or maya.

If I take my low poly to zbrush and smooth it then I have to harden up the mechanical parts again, if I subdivide without smoothing then I have to smooth out the polys on the organic parts. Right now what I'm thinking about doing is just splitting the model into two for each kind of surface, making a normal map for each, and then just combining those maps together in photoshop (since I'll probably be adding a detail map anyway at some point).

Is there an easier approach?

Thanks for any replies.

MoP

Who says you have to export all the surfaces to ZBrush or Mudbox?
Model your highpoly so the organic parts are separate meshes, do all the "technical" stuff purely in Max or Maya, then send out the "base" highpoly organic bits into ZBrush and work on those, then bring them back into your app for baking into one normal map.
You don't really even have to do a normal map for each and combine them, you can just bake it all down to a single lowpoly mesh.

Caravaggio

Well MoP pretty much has an idea similar to what I was thinking.
The thing is I wanted to do the low first and haven't used any smoothing/nurbs so my cage is the lowpoly. At least that's if I interpret per's terminology right.
Thanks.

low odor

Cage= mesh optimised for condusive results in sub-d modeling, or sculpting app

lowpoly model= mesh optimised to show the best silhouette with the least amount of triangles.