An attempt for a realistic African Bush Elephant. I am not sure if I want to keep sculpting details using dyntopo or if I should just retopologise and start sculpting with a multi-resolution modifier.
I made some skin wrinkles as an experiment, but I feel that the finer details, especially the complexity of the proboscis (trunk) will not be feasible with dyntopo. It’s already way too many polys for my old PC to handle smoothly.
But it’s been very fun sculpting this magnificent animal, one of my favorites since I was a child.
My hope is to finish and animate it as realistically as possible, but for a hobbyist with less than a year’s experience I feel that I may be over my head on this one 
This looks awesome Alex! Nicely done. For the finer wrinkles I would say use a normal map 
Have a base minimal mesh and then sculpt a higher poly version then bake the normals and displacement. Then you could animate the lower poly version with ease but still have the detail unless you are going to be zooming in to skin pore detail then geometry might be needed.
Hey Alex and Steve, thanks for the replies and directions. Sorry I’m getting back to you now, it’s been a crazy few days of partying over here
Now for the matter at hand, I am familiar with the process of baking normals, I’ve done it a few times before on some other experimental projects.
Maybe it was the way I wrote it that was a bit confusing, but my main dilemma was whether to sculpt the High Poly model with DynTopo or Multires.
Because of how slow my computer was getting with DynTopo, I decided to do a quick and dirty retopo, make a High Subdivision copy of it for sculpting details in Multires and keep a low version of the retopo to use for animating and stuff. Multires seems to be going much faster and giving me greater detail.
I’ll clean the Retopo when I’m done because I don’t have enough practical experience with Topology to make it clean from the start.
I would like to create geometry for some of the skin wrinkles but it seems like a crazy amount of work to retopo all those wrinkles, so I’ll probably leave them as normals/bumps/displacements.
I also somewhat erased the wrinkles I had so far but left a trace of them for some very basic geometry there, so it’s not completely flat geometry with a detailed shader on.
Also one thing you can do is hide all the mesh except the part that you are sculpting. This can help in it not being so slow
Tried that but no luck. Must be something about DynTopo that my PC doesn’t like 
Not a problem though Multires is doing fine so I’ll stick to that. It will also be much better for using some Alpha Brushes later on.
Testing a very basic Rig. Just automatic results, I haven’t messed about with Weight Paint, muscle deformations, or anything else, just a very early experiment 
oh shoot it’s coming to life! 
Nice!
Indeed! Now to teach a giant how to take its first steps Thank you Alex!!
