Its that highreflective metal you find in stripbars (sorry, I really was unable to make up another location just right now)...or liftdoors... after years of decay. It looks kind of like that to me.
If I would use
this texture on a door...would you say it doesnt look like metal and is overdone and unrealistically damaged? Could be, but its indeed an unedited photograph
You see, they match the
scenes I use them in. And they seem dirty.
I'm a total beginner, I really think that its totally awesome that this red line matches on every side of the model.
pointing me to some professional work on polycount is like hitting some hobbypencil artist with the work of DaVinci. Or telling a filmstudent that his work isn't Citizen Kane.
Dont worry

I know that texture and modelwise these are just a bunch of boxes and cylinders with some overdone cgtextures stuff... but I like them. We already proved that "hard to read" stuff.
The point I want to make is that my game should look like an amateur game. Like something I made with basic tools and sloppy planning. Especially like something I made. "hey look! it has all this dirt, too much sharpening and contrast...Wolf did that!"
Then there is this by the book, follow tutorials stuff that is, from an objective point of view, much higher in quality but yet lagging any soul. By looking on the average sceneasset in a typical UDK project can you tell who made it? By looking at the texture of a spaceship in scene 1002492 can you say "hey! Bobby made it! Look! It looks exactly like all the other stereotypical stuff...perfect but...completely soulless."
Dont get me wrong, I do want to get better in time, but I dont want to make my stuff end up looking exactly like all the other stuff on the polycount forums. Same workflow, same tools, same tutorials it origins from...same boring stuff.
Its like the first star wars movies with all these primitive special effects and the teddybears running around. And then later these mindnumbing boring CGI pieces of nothing that they call "prequels"...this is pretty much what my rant in d minor wants to point out.
Then again, you still didn't elaborate on that "gee good to know you respond to crits well" thing.