Managed to get it all quads, still not smooth perfectly, but its barely noticable. The rings I added are now causing some issues, so I might just make them run as single loops around the cylinder, until they get to the area of the cylinder, so it doesn't causing pinching.
I use gray materials from undoz when sculpting. For brushes, a mix of clay tubes / flatten / pinch / smooth & a custom one for cutting some details. I would probably use a bunch of new ones if i was using Zb4 tho. Find what works best for you.
I'm just gonna go cry myself to sleep. Any advice on understanding how to create the shapes you need? I tend to get bogged down for hours trying to create some of the more complex high poly forms and shapes, getting them to smooth with no pinching and so forth.
Dude, your textures are awesome! :D DOESN'T PAINTING THIS SHIT RULE! The one crit I can kinda make, is I think you should paint your flesh and cloth a little more resembling what that 'pinched Zbrush' is like (not sure if that's being clear). Love the huge details!
Ok so im done with the high poly, there are a few pinches i might work with but this is basically what im finishing with. Im going to move onto the low poly now and prepare it for normal maps, if you guys have any suggestions please done hesitate to tell me. :D
Managed to fix the pinching, which is relatively easy, but i'm too stupid to notice it before. The lowpoly and bake is done, its 5.3k and early textures done with substance. Here's how it look now. Now i just need to model a small desert environment to showcase the character for the final presentation.
Watch out for poles with more then four edges in your base mesh, as they'll cause pinching. Also, you'll want your mesh to be as close as possible to 100% quads. EDIT: 5-poles are sometimes unavoidable, but you just need to place them strategically. They are useful for redirecting edge flow.
I actually noticed a lot of flaws in the real world, which you normally would try to fix when doing 3D, sometimes something looks pinched, or things doesn't fit together and you thinking "shit, that's crappy put together, and here I always try to do it perfectly".
I imagine it's going to be similar to a water effect, so you'll probably need a normal map, a Du/Dv map (for refraction) and a diffuse map. But yeah, you'll need more info from them for sure. There's probably a better way to do it these days, so take the above with a pinch of salt.
If there's weird mesh pinching you want to smooth out, try using the smooth brush with the Shift modifier, but then RELEASE the Shift button when you're drawing on screen to use a different algorithim that may get your the results you want.