>>497597IMO mudbox as others have said is strong for texture painting, it wins over zbrush. that being said, there are other painting applications that beat out mudbox, mari being the obvious answer, which if you have used mudbox and mari , you would see how much better mari is, i don't have much experience with substance painter, but it looks pretty sweet, mari might be over kill for most tasks , so substance painter seems like the natural choice. your workflow is pretty standard and honestly zbrush will take you further than mudbox ever will, fiber mesh is pretty useless, BUT you can extract the control splines for use in maya, zremesher is pretty useless for end result , but it is very useful, example you are sculpting pants, you dynamesh (lets ignore marvelous designer for now ;) ) your pants are looking good , dyna mesh topology is dense and retarded, you clone your pants, you zremesh your clone, get some ok topology, can subdivide it and work with it a little easier, you want to get some texture on there, say like motorcycle pants , you use zbrushes auto uv on your zremesh , then you can use noisemaker to toss your pattern, you could also export the uv and apply a pattern in photoshop and then use that to displace your mesh inside of zbrush. really easy workflow, it's fast and you get nice results really quickly. polypaint is shit, it sucks that it is shit, but there is no other way around it, and zspotlight was a fucking failure right out of the gate, i tried to use it for months and it crashed me so many times couldn't even care at the end of it , i knew it was my own stupid fault. in short , use zbrush, read a few books, realize what you want to do , considering the workflow you outlined your interest is characters, so your are really only going to be using 10-20 features/ brushes. zbrush is such a powerful tool, and as a sculpting tool, it is much faster than mudbox.