During one of my 3D classes at Platt College, one of my instructors showed us the Making of Varga as a source of inspiration. Funnily enough, the most inspiring part of the process for me was not the modeling or texturing, but specifically the Normal Mapping techniques.
I’ve created some quick and dirty files for download:
The Normal Map Builder file is a C4D R12 file based on the 3D File Example section of the Varga page. let me know if this is useful to you at all.