Alien Soldier Texturing - Tidying up the art, layering on the detail

So I'm making a lot of progress now, updates will be a bit slower because I'm just getting on with the art so there wouldn't be much to show you anyway until I actually got more done. What I'm doing now as you can probably see is sort of mapping out all the very detailed parts, so things like scratches and even a weld mark which is what the blotchy black line going across is. This is all going to be cleaned up and coloured properly so that it will make the texture look far more detailed than just having a simple grainy look to it.

Not only that, I've also started clearing up the emblem now, it looks very basic, but the art as you can see is a lot cleaner and more precise. Once I tidy it up some more I'll then work on the detail and then that should make the texture look really nice in 3D because you may have noticed that with texturing the computer sees everything you've done, so even the slightest scribble can end up making the texture look like garbage.

Cleaning up the scarab, that's what the emblem is by the way if you didn't get it at first, a scarab and a pair of mandibles.

Just for fun so we can see how the actual displacement map changes according to what I've drawn I'm also posting up a render of the actual texture in Maya.

Blergh :( shit, unfortunately it seems that if I tune up the displacement too much I end up with the texture looking like this or worse, but if I scale the settings down then it barely makes a difference. It looks like because I'm so new to the displacement maps I will have to do a ton of research on just exactly how they work so that I can get the right sort of effects. I've seen people doing subtle but 3D looking textures so I know it's possible, a lot of it may be down to eye, but I'll have to check out how to do everything first.