these are older models that I made. One has about 800 triangles and the other has 1600 triangles.

It varies a bit. In general with characters I createa a very high poly version of the model between 4-12 million polys and add a lot of detail. I first cover areas with main colors. After that, I add a dynamic mask to my brush with an alpha that only alows small points of paint to go through with each click or random position for the points if you hold down. This makes the color less flat and a little more realistic, I also do some smoothing of the color whenever needed.Next, I create a cavity mask to add some more detail to cavity areas, similiar to using an occlusion map which I also use instead of doing this or with it sometimes. After that I am pretty much done. Of course that normal maps and a good setup for the material helps a lot. One other thing that helps a lot is to use photoshop/gimp (elements and gimp in my case).

I don't always use it but I used for example to make this hammer. Initially I was just planning to make a simple model for the hammer and then use gimp and photoshop to texture it and maybe get a normal map out of the texture. Well it was not turning out the way I wanted and the metal wasn't looking too good so I made a high poly version of the hammer and used photoshop to create an alpha texture of one of my pictures of metal. I then used this reference as a mask to actually create the detail on the hammer. With that I could create a good normal map. In addition, now that there was a detailed surface it was easier to texture it to make it look more like metal using the process I mentioned above. For the lava spawn model I did all by hand using the process above but in the end I used some photoshop to overlay a rocky image I have over the painted rock that I had created which wasn't looking as good as the rest.

Does this paint a good picture of the overal process? Do you have more questions?