Need an advice on improving scultping skills.

S for scale probably is expected to do something different like it still does in all other mesh editing concepts and it might be confusing. That said S was the first key I tried when I searched for the ctrl-a functionality.

 

But the cool concept about blender is that the key you learn somewhere work everywhere which makes it intuitive to me But I guess specifically in the context of the skin modifier, scaling vertex and scaling edge were in conflicts (hypothesis), basically selecting multiple vertex create ambiguity as to whether you want to scale the edges between them or scale the skin, though I wonder if that could be simply get around by having edges and vertex selection mode work differently (still an ambiguity though).

 

learn anatomy
if you're going into characters learn how the bones look like, where the muscles are, where the fat builds up etc

 

I'm a bit late on the Zbrush topic, but I guess I could post anyway.

I got ZbrushCore as a christmas gift, and for the last 2.5 months I've been fiddling around with it. Before getting my hands on Core I've tried the Zbrush trial like 3 times, and I always got frustrated about how quirky it is to use. Oddly enough I got mostly used to it after a week of messing around. There are still some downright weird ways to do some things, though.

I can't say how well it compares to Blender's sculpting, but as someone who used to sculpt in C4D, zCore is way better. From my experience so far, here are my main pros/cons about zCore:

Pros:
- Powerful. My current project is hanging around at 15 million and moving around and sculpting is a breeze on an i5-4440.
- Fast to use. Stuff like the "Extract" tool and radial symmetry etc. make Core quite fast to use.
- Dynamesh is great. When it works.
- There are more, but it's late and I'd rather wrap this one up.

Cons:
- Dynamesh often messes up your mesh. Whenever I use dynamesh I often end up with bad polygons or just holes in my mesh. It's also very likely that a symmetrical model won't be symmetrical after the operation, so you'll have to manually mirror and weld it to make it symmetrical again.
- No plugin support. At first I thought this was just a minor issue, but this includes stuff like the Transpose Master. It's pretty much an essential tool for posing stuff inside Zbrush, so posing anything has been painful.
- Often when I try to save an existing project Core will bug out and tell me that it can't save the project because "Sorry, ZCore can only save/open files created inside ZbrushCore". Makes sense.
- ZCore often crashes or hangs like crazy during startup. If I click anywhere when Core is booting, it crashes 10/10 times.
- No remeshing tools. This is by far what disappointed me the most.
- Really basic brush functionality. There are only 30 brushes, and you can't control things like curve or any more advanced settings. Also, you cannot use brushes created in Zbrush.
- Some parts of the workflow are really odd. For example, in order to turn ZSpheres into editable geometry, you'll have to turn it into a tool. It then clears your whole canvas, only showing that new mesh. Then you have to scroll through the tools palette to find your previous tool, then append the newly made tool as a new subtool, then separately delete the ZSphere. I might be doing something wrong and this might all be easy to some more seasoned users, but I can say I spent a lot of time trying to figure this out.
- Oh, and the UI is still difficult to get used to. Sometimes scrolling along the tool palette with a tablet feels extremely clumsy. And it doesn't help how half the stuff has the prefix "Z".

As I said, this is based on my experience so far. There are a lot of cons, but to me the pros still outweigh them.

If you're satisfied with Blender, use it. If you want some good (semi-advanced) sculpting tools, get ZbrushCore. If you want arguably the best tool on the market, get Zbrush. There's also 3D-Coat, which has an "Amateur" version priced similarly to ZCore.

Oh, and I guess I could show what I've been working on to give you an idea what you can do with Core (obviously this isn't the best you can do with it. Click the image to enlarge it):



The clock was made inside C4D.