I would say it depend of your machine power, and you rfinal rendering : if you pc can handle super high level, I would suggest to sculpt it.
If your pc can’t, you have the solution to paint a bump, but sometime its not handy to work and also render mix of clor and bump.
Thats why I would recommand to do it mostly for extrnal render.
couldnt i just sculpt the pours then turn them into a displacement map. Also then turn the displace map into a bump map?
thats it, but use the mid level to generate the displacement to be used as bump.
Beautiful piece of work, Sebcesoir (hey…not unusual!) and generous of you
to share your workflow assets also 
small_orange_diamond
Chris
Allo Seb,
I saw this on your site the other day, It’s cool to see how it grew up. I really like the armor on this one.
This is very quick and dirty, with a proper specular and diffuse map it would look a hundred times better. For the diffuse map I quickly painted one in flat colours. The skin is one solid shade of pink except for the lips being slightly darker, and the metal is just two colours, a blue for the base and orange for the extrusions. The specular is just a contrast-increased version of the diffuse. If you feel like releasing low resolution versions of your specular and diffuse go right ahead. 
Attachments
Works great this time!
Can you punch it in realtime? 
Nice wock, O.K. Fantastic
Wow A truly amazing! model Sebcesoir.
But i Have two questions to ask you, which i would greatly appreciate if you answered (that is if you have time)
How do you position the details with such accuracy and how do you make the Alphas for the details (Do you make them in Zbrush or Photoshop etc…)?
5 *
Awesome. A really great work.