I’ve heard Kent say that you work with what you get. So a lot of times you will get a concept art that is not on a T pose and you have to work with it, and from there you can sculpt and translate the art from 2D to 3D and it’s recognizable. I think ideally you can produce various sculpts, some in whatever poses that capture the character essence, since it’s a challenge to have a 2D art and look at it in 3D and feel it’s the same. You can always sculpt it in a pose and then with the pose brush get it into a neutral pose, but that can fail and can be finicky and you’ll get undesirable results, so it’s better to make the sculpt with the end goal in mind. So if you’re free flowing, just sculpting away to try and nail the character for approval, so you sculpt for that. But then when you’re generating the sculpt that is going for retopo and rigging, it’s better to sculpt it in a T pose. Of course if you can ask the concept artist to give you a T pose, then it’s even better, because for rigging it will have to be on T pose.
Yes, a new sculpting fundamentals is in the works, but as you say, you can watch both, it’s more knowledge for you.I think it may come out in less than 2 months maybe?
The courses that are going to give you all the super powers of the workflow, even though they are oldies, are these two:
https://cgcookie.com/courses/short-film-character-production
https://cgcookie.com/courses/modeling-realistic-characters-with-blender
