Been searching this up quite a lot and I've finally found out how they sort of do the 'AAA' workflow in games when it's artists that actually know what they're doing. There are tutorials a dime a dozen on sculpting generally but it's amazing how flat out bad some of them are, no way of being polite about it. They're just throwing up a 10 minute tutorial on how to do something and teaching beginners extremely bad practice for the long term.
There's another method involving plane extrusion reptology after you finish a sculpt of a model and those are very common but I feel like that's for people who are absolutely anal about polygon count. This sculpt method provides a great balance for people who want to get something out results wise while still respecting the concept of clean topology.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2_uiUEcY7w
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZgUAWpiIw8
Here is also a tutorial that properly goes into the workflow for baking sculpted stuff to a normal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8xrSgyfEHs&t=171s
Could easily see myself adapting this for a general animation workflow too thought I'd post up this little research compilation for everybody to look at who might be wanting to get into 3D and of course, all of this is done in Blender. I've also been looking in more detail with texture paint and that workflow is viable as well it's just fiddly with the settings.
This overlaps somewhat with my interest in modelling for 3d printing, and I suspect that in some cases we'll see better pure modelling coming out of that community than the gamedev side - if nothing else, a badly clipped edge can be hidden in the game, but it turns into unusable garbage when you try and slice it for printing.
Saying that, I've spent more than a year now on one model and not even tried printing it yet, so I am not your guy for efficient workflow.
You too huh?
Tbf I've modelled and printed a bunch of stuff in the meantime, but there's this one project that's taken way too long, lol.