Re: How does it compare?

Wow, that's a lot of figures there! I hope I'm not keeping you too busy replying to all my fairly lengthy comments here. :)

I doubt I'll be trying anything too taxing for a while yet. In many cases I'm picturing just animating a character and rendering it out with an alpha channel to use in an After Effects comp. I am starting to wonder why I invested in putting 16 GB of RAM in my Mac, though. I haven't found anything that uses it yet. I suppose it isn't utilized in Blender either?

I thought I heard in one modeling tutorial that you can recalculate the mesh into all quads. Does that mean it's possible to work up the model without worrying about tris & quads and just have it reorganized, or is that likely to cause unwanted results? I tried a couple merge operations that badly twisted up the geometry. As a sculptor, I like the the way the sculpt mode works for modeling, but worry that it creates a mess of a mesh compared to slowly extruding your model out from a simple cube as done in the tutorial. It also seemed like activating multires disables some other editing options.

I'd like to use this method more, but the sculpting process can be slow and time consuming (in an enjoyable, artist at work way) but I'd like to know that no matter how complex a shape I end up with by pulling, smearing, inflating and pinching the mesh that the result will be a workable, riggable model.

I really appreciate your quick and detailed replies. As I said before I feel like I'm monopolizing your time a bit. As I piece together more practice and knowledge of Blender, I'll have fewer questions I won't be able to look up myself, but at the moment it's a bit of a bottleneck as I want to learn every main function at the same time. It was similar when teaching myself Flash and After Effects. You have to go a piece at a time to properly absorb it, and it takes me a few days of wanting get up to speed too quick before I steady the pace.