From the stuff I have been doing at home I generally ignore the lower poly model at the start. The reason for this is that I don't want to be constrained by the final low poly piece when working on the high poly version. I'd say that for the concept you chose the Zbrush part is quite a while away, and you can do most of it…
You can hold down the space bar to bring up the Hotbox. If you click and hold on the center Maya button, you get quick access to all orthographic views. It's not the Viewcube, but it prevents having to swap between viewports constantly. Maya saves any objects you copy to some file somewhere, which Maya uses as a permanent…
Hi! Using sets for the polygroups actually a great idea. I'll look into it. The problem is here: I chose the type of communication between maya-zbrush-max-etc to be one single obj file is to make it more simple. So for example using obj files per geometry would be harder to implement in Zbrush. Zbrush now has some…
Brackets appear when an object is selected or when there is a key frame on the object at the current slider time. The J key is the default hotkeys to turn them off.
Does you object have a lightmap? If not, the engine will try to bake lighting into the object's vertices. The verts will probably bake black since they are so close (or in) to the wall.