hey, this is my first post on here and ive finished modeling this character just for some fun. heres a sample:
I was really disappointed when i tried texturing his face because i couldnt get the look i wanted 
does anyone know how i can paint realistic skin??
here are some things ive seen and are examples of what im trying to go for:
thanx in advance!
I haven’t started using textures in zbrush yet, but I’ve seen that one of the ways to do it is importing a texture of the skin (google human skin 
) (uncheck zadd, rgb remains checked). And placing that texture on your model (smaller brush size for small portions, larger for large). Try combining with alphas, and try different materials as well. Perhaps the best config is with standard brush and dragrect selected.
CR
For an easy way out, take a picture of someone`s skin, and use it as a texture.
For harder method, try spray painting. Using as many skin shades as needed.
your example links are a bit weird to me because they go really different directions. The first is really cartoony and the the second one with the uncharted character, well it’s almost like a plain color with projected beard areas - but it doesn’t look realistic. If you want to paint realistic skin, I would prefer a software like bodypaint where you have layers like photoshop. Then paint layer by layer, blending different skin tones with each other.
Painting turned out to be the easy part, at least for me. I think photos are not the way to go. They always look like photos stretched on skin unless you spent quite some time making them just so, and it takes a long time to find the right photos. Also, if you make something TOO realistic, it looks wrong when there is any small flaw.
The book by scott spencer was great, and helped a lot here, though reading other general art stuff helped, too. Basically you paint in layers, first the cool tones, then the yellows, then the reds on top. Then you go along and make surface detail marks in bright white, speckling basically. Then you adjust the tone and you are done. Areas with bones close to skin are yellowish, like forehead. Fleshy parts like cheeks and ears are warm/red, recessed or less bloody areas are bluer. Zbrush is an awesome painter, IMO, but you have to figure out how to make the brushes do what you want, mostly probably with blob and spray settings.
wow, thanx. so if i were painting in layers should i be using photoshop? or does zbrush already have layers for polypainting??
Hopefully, they might have it in ZBrush4.
If you know the steps involved, you could pull it off in a single layer though.
One more thing, painting in layers doesn`t just mean paint in separate layers like in photoshop.
It means adding sheen of layers of paint one by one above the surface.
The guy gave a really good general brief about the process.
ok, so i have my sculpt and a lowpoly. if im poly painting ontop of my sculpt is
there a way to project that texture onto my lowpoly??
You mean you have a low poly, subdivided it, and then sculpted on the HiRes right?
If it`s in polypaint mode, no, because the resolution of your paint depend on how dense your mesh is.
However, Since they shared the same UV, if you convert the polypaint to texture, the texture will be automatically fitted into the LowRes
Be sure not to turn SmoothUV on when you subdivided though.
Go to Tool --> Texture --> col>txr
If you want to go back to polypaint mode, simply turn the texture off. Since polypaint baked the colors data into the pixols themselves, you won`t lose it.