First I always begin with a pen and a sheet of paper. I draw some sketches down, to have a directive line and to maintain the same idea all the way down the road.
The character's basemesh is fully modeled in Maya, I then always create the clean UVs in Maya because of the good tools available for this kind of work and export my model for the sculpting stage. Once the forms and the proportions are better, I go back in Maya and begin to create all the props. Since a lot of elements will be sculpted, I always try to keep everything clean and in quads.
I then pose my model with all the elements together and push the sculpt higher, removing minor deformations which may occur during the posing.
When everything is ok on the sculpt, I begin to create the textures. Since I'm planning to render in high resolution, I use large textures files. The first render tests are done without any texture though. This way, it is much easier to place the different lights and observe their impact on the model. When this is all done, I just bring in all the different textures and tweak my shaders and lights accordingly. I then make a lot of render tests, particularly spending a lot of time going back and forth trying to improve each thing.
There's nothing really special about the shaders I use. I just tweak them until I am happy with the results. Textures are really important here too. You rarely get a nice shader if you have bad textures. If you want to have a nice render, you will need to be very careful with the lighting, shaders and textures. These three factors are interconnected and must be worked with together. I've used two area and one ambient light for the background and three area lights plus one spotlight for the character to get a better hue on the face and to add more diffused light. For the the final rendering, I'm used to creating multiple passes since it allows for much more flexibility and the rendering time is better too. In the picture below, you can see some of my different passes. I've made the choice to separate the background for obvious reasons.
You can see the ambient occlusion and SSS pass, but I've also used a ZDepth pass and some additional ones as well.
The post production work became really easy and fast using this technique.
The pass such as Ambient Occlusion is really important in letting you add more details and get better shadows.
Here is the final artwork, And a close-up:
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