Yeah, the lighting certainly has helped. Also good to have brought out the less obvious details in the texture some and it's nice to see some more colour variation. Decals are the way to go, though I'm unsure how such a task would be done within max. It's lookin great, keep at it
most game engines (ones i've used anyways) alow you to do blood an such on decal layers, this is usualy done in a seperate uv channel, and the game sets the textures in that channel as either an overlay, or sometimes just stick them on top like a sticker (you alpha out the areas you don't want to show) i think theres a way…