High poly workflow for 3d modeling?

Regardless if it's low or high poly, the techniques are really all the same. You can choose to do either one or the other according to your style of modeling. I prefer poly modeling for most parts of the head and face and box modeling for the body. Most models are low poly in essence, even the ones you consider to be high poly. All game engines normally have a limit to polys which is pretty low. With that being said, many times character models have super high quality textures which makes low poly toons look high poly. Certain static objects in games and film are very high poly, but are preloaded by the engines system, minimizing the resources used to load an entire game. The most important thing to worry about besides polys is the rigging and skinning of characters in animation. Linking the bones to the correct places on the model and giving the model a skin that bends when needed, is far more important than low or high poly counts.

The main reason you don't see many, if any tutorials or tips on high poly stuff is because, it's as easy as adding a turbosmooth modifier to an object to make it from low to high poly. Other than that just adding more polys outside of a turbosmooth modifier is as easy as adding more edgeloops or tessellation.

As for the arms and legs, there is no perfect amount of verts or polys in the formula. You basically want to have the shoulders, elbow joints and wrist joints medium to high poly for bending when skinned. 6 - 8 verts is not nearly enough to get good, realistic bending of parts. But this only applies to photorealistic toons. Stylized and/or cartoony toons may have very low poly movement and bend points but that's where it ends.

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