Thank you for the clarification, Paloth. You and Bruno certainly did not suggest that, but Shawn does, I believe. Although, perhaps I misinterpreted his answer. (I never do quite know what he means by "3DS.")

You are most correct that a person can create a character from the ground up in Mudbox and Zbrush. Particularly so in Zbrush, as it has tools made specifically with this intention. As for me, I often like to sculpt models of bonsai like this - for simple relaxation and recreation. But I am not intending to animate the bonsai.

You are certainly correct that it is possible to purchase programs that automatically re-topologize (reduce the number of polygons in a model according to a series of mathematical functions) a mesh made with Zbrush or Mudbox. Zbrush has a relatively nice built-in function for this purpose, but Mudbox does not. 3DCoat's automatically retopologizing feature is quite interesting in that it can be "semi-automatic" and give you some control over the direction of the edge-rings that need to be preserved for purposes of animation. Some of these re-topologizing programs are more powerful and efficient than others. I myself make use of Atangeo Balancer (http://www.atangeo.com/) for working on Reaflow water meshes that are intended to be static objects, and not animated.

So, it is good of you to point this out.  For people interested only and entirely in "sculpting", this surely is the way to go. To purchase Zbrush (would be my first choice if this is the primary interest and intent), or possibly Mudbox, and then to consider purchase of a third-party re-topologizer if the sculpted mesh is intended to be used in Vue or some other environment sure to include lots of other high-polygon-count objects.

My comments were meant only to clarify the idea that characters intended for animation (or even for re-posing among a number of static positions) generally are thought to require design for this purpose.

The intentional design is accomplished by considering musculature and skeleton and thinking about how these two things are deformed under movement. Simple cartoon characters perhaps don't need a lot of planning in this regard, but the closer and closer a character is intended to come toward a realworld animal or human, the more and more planning and forethought have to go into this deliberate design.  (ouch! I can hear the cries of the pro's complaining that cartoon characters need every bit as much planning as photorealistic characters, even now.)

Once these things have been considered and planned out, the critical task of the model-builder is to deliberately design and lay out a mesh topology to accomplish this.

The primary tools for creating a foundation mesh of this sort are the conventional 3d model-building tools. For a foundation mesh, almost any of the conventional 3d programs will do the job. Such programs give the model-builder the ability to exactly control the extent and direction of mesh lines and their interconnections (topology), and to make corrections to these mesh line directions and interconnections as they prove necessary.

This is not the realm of Zbrush and Mudbox and 3DCoat. Instead, these latter are programs for reshaping areas of a pre-constructed mesh.  You can pinch and fold, and push down and pull up. These are "surface resculpters," if you will. And that's the only point I was trying to make. And only because a person newly come to 3d modelling might not know this.