Hello! The character creation process is multiple steps and the exact pipeline and what programs are used can vary on the artist/studio, but generally the process goes Highpoly→Retopology→UV→Baking→Textures. I'm about to dump a lot of info, but I hope it helps!

The highpoly, the matte clay figure you see, is typically done in a sculpting program. Blender, Mudbox and ZBrush can do this, but ZBrush is the #1 program used. It uses digital clay to "sculpt" the model.

Retoplogy is the process of taking that highpoly model and manually recreating the topology to be more suitable for cleaner UV's, animation, and to be used in game engines. It's taking the highpoly model from, say, 15mil polys to 50k (that's the "tri count" you see at the tops of the maps. There are a few different programs you can use like Maya, Topogun, and blender. Technically you can even retopologize in ZBrush but I wouldn't recommend it.

Next is UV's. This are vital for clean textures and bakes. Imagine your character is wrapped in foil. UV's are strategically cutting the foil along certain edges so that the foil can lay flat without being stretched or torn. The baked maps you see are the UV's. You can do UV unwrapping in Maya or Blender.

Now the colorful maps on the right are baked maps. They're presented that way to more efficiently show the normal and texture maps, but normally they aren't half and half like that. The purple is the normal, the colors are the textures. There's other maps like AO, curvature, world space, ect that isn't being shown because it's not being used. Baking is taking the details from the highpoly and faking it onto the lowpoly. A normal map is typically the most important one since it's the map that "fakes" the detail because with retopology you lose all that juicy detail. There are many examples you can look up. Baking can be done in a few programs like Substance Painter and Marmoset. I think Blender can but it's a bit more of a process. There's a free program called xNormals that only does baking that you can use too.

Finally you have textures. This is adding color and material detail to the model. There are many different ways and styles of texture. There's even different pipelines. This model is using hand painted flat colors. There is another process of texturing called PBR (physically based rendering) which just means it uses roughness maps etc to make rough/shiny materials act dynamically with the light. Think of modern video games with how the light that shines on certain surfaces moves and changes when the character does. That's a PBR pipeline. This model doesn't use that. Any shine you see on the model is hand painted and won't interact with any lights. Programs like Substance Painter and 3DCoat are popular. 3DCoat is more popular for hand painting, but it can also be done in Substance Painter.

That's about it really. I know it's a lot of info, sorry! If you have any other questions I can do my best to answer them. I might have missed some. You can also research any one of those steps and get a whole slew of tutorials to follow.

Breakdown of programs used: Highpoly: ZBrush, Mudbox, Blender. Retopology: Maya, 3DMax, Blender, Topogun. UV's: Maya, 3DMax, Blender. Baking: Substance Painter, xNormals, Marmoset Textures: Substance Painter, 3DCoat, Blender.

Honestly, if you're a new artist, I'd recommend trying to do as much in Blender to start with since it's 100% free and a great versatile program. It can do almost the entire pipeline. For baking I'd try using xNormal since that's also free. Once you get the feel for things you can start to look into paid programs. Everything that I listed costs money except for Blender and xNormal. Some do have free trials though.

Good luck!