you may not want to hear this but i suggest going through some tutorials before trying to tackle models like this. i suggest websites like blender guru and blender cookie for tutorials its where i learned to use blender. hope this helps :)
@Lurcisia Thank you! I used some coding, VEX and Python, but not very much. Most of time I worked with nodes. I didn't follow a tutorial, but one tutorial that it helps me a lot on this (at the begining) was "Game Asset Creation with Houdini", available on Udemy.
Sure thing. I'll see about putting together a simple tutorial shortly. I need to make some rock models for the environment I'm working on so I'll do that in the next few days and hopefully in a week or so I'll have the tutorial ready.
If you want make everything handpainted you should add more highlights, maybe in this way? Note, that highlight here is almost white: You should also check this tutorial about paining gold. https://foervraengd.deviantart.com/art/Tutorial-Painting-Gold-490209106
This. Also, stocks are nowhere near that boxy, Have a look here: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=72252&highlight=stock+modeling+tutorial It's a tutorial I created for someone on crymod a while back to demonstrate how to make a stock look better and not boxy.
if you want glow, you would either need to add a volume fog to the Omni light as a post effect. or you could use Mental ray. Follow this tutorial if you decide to use mental Ray http://www.cgarena.com/freestuff/tutorials/max/glowingmaterial/
Rather then deleting the other half of the lowpoly (when baking the normal map), offset these uv's so they dont render. You can read about it as part of poop's tutorial. http://www.poopinmymouth.com/tutorial/normal_workflow_2.htm Or you can (as shrew81 said) fix it in PS.
There are some pretty good tutorials here http://www.gfxartist.com/features/tutorials including some from Craig Mullins, Jason Manley, and Glen Fabry. Not neccesarily 100% photoshop related, but the knowledge is transferable I think. Software is just a tool anyway. James Ball
Also there is this... http://www.fileplanet.com/dl.aspx?/planetquake/polycount/tutorials/video/zbrush2_max7.zip The practical guide is what I used to learn it, but the above tutorial is all in real time with audio to guide you. I go over all the tools I use anyway.
That's a fun problem! I'd suggest adding C4D as the prefix to your thread title, which will draw in people familiar with this software. The tutorials in this thread might be useful for you. https://polycount.com/discussion/179105/digital-meat-cinema-4d-unity-playmaker-and-plugins-tutorials/p1