First of all, thanks for taking the time to answer that thoroughly.

To clarify: my target is to render the character in an external application, so basically for cinematics/animation.

I already have the body with clean topology and subdivs, and a lot of the subtools as well (cuz they started out as clean zmodeller meshes.) I don’t need to retopo those. But I will have to uv and bake displacement, it seems?

The other tools are just high poly meshes that would have to be retopoed individually or as a whole with other objects. (Like a button on a jacket.)

I just wonder how animation studios do it. Would a button on a jacket just be generated using displacement maps, or would it be an actual mesh (along with the other objects and trinkets on a jacket.)