Looking for Texturing Advice

FFQOTSA

Hey guys,

I'm a fairly young aspiring 3D hard-surface artist. I am a first-year student on a game design course. When I am modelling things in 3DS Max, I find myself being very satisfied with my techniques and the overall look of the things I make. Its just that whenever I have unwrapped my UV's and started to texture the model in Photoshop, I feel that the textures really let the model down. I look on sites like this for inspiration but end up feeling worse because at how good people are at this kind of stuff and i am not. Basically, I would like some feedback on these...









Some of the stuff I have made^
(The Axe is WIP)

Any links to good tutorials for texturing, articles about the theory behind it, general advice, anything that you wish you had known when you were just starting and learning would be appreciated.
Thank you

Proxywars

A great artist named Racer445 has made some great Photorealistic texturing tutorials. Look up some of his youtube lessons and blog lessons also Millenia has a great M37 Ithaca tutorial that I think you should watch immediently. So far your work is great, if you could post some hipoly I could critique it a little better. Your wood looks way to perfect to be realistic. I think you should add a bit more varietion to your wood like adding some scratches in the normals, blotches, and this is from texture newb's perspective so I may not have the best advice to fix it =/