A long time ago, I got a book with Alex Alvarez's "Lanker" model on the cover called " Maya 2 Character Animation" by Nathan Vogel, Sherri Sheridan, Tim Coleman (Paperback, December 1999)

Alex and friends went over the creation and animation of his model, and in particular, it goes over Alex's older way of modeling using nurbs, and inserting TONS of isoparms to add detail.

Now with Subd's and convert to polys, I guess you could use that technique, and/or other folks techniques and then just cleanup the model and/or convert it to whatever for easier workflow

The book that I had is here:
https://search.barnesandnoble.com/boo...5708665&itm=29


Anyone else suggest anything?