This is not a step by step tutorial. I will summarize the workflow i used for one of my characters with lots of images and some print-screens directly from the applications used ( maya/mudbox/photoshop etc ...), also in the end i will provide some info about tangent space normal maps so you could think of this tutorial as mainly normal mapping related stuff.

Tip:whenever you see a hand cursor while hovering over an image you can click on it to see a high rez version of the image , like in the image below

This character is my entry for Dominance War II competition ( [Tens de ter uma conta e sessão iniciada para poderes visualizar este link] ). The main theme of the competition was to design a game (low-poly) character and were some rules (limitations) about the specs we could use for geometry and textures( main character will not exceed 6000 triangles , 1000 more triangles for weapons/gear and we could use a pet also but the budget will come from main character; for textures we could use 1x2048 square for main character + pet, if any , and another 1x1024 square for weapons/detachable gear; diffuse, specular, normal,bump,opacity ,glow,reflection maps were allowed).

This tutorial is intended for game (low poly) characters and assumes that you have a basic knowledge of normal mapping and its use; you can search on google if you need more info about this subject ( a good start will be this page on zbrush.info ).

I will start by showing you the final files sent to the competition to give you an idea about the direction this tutorial is going.