Textures and Questions

[BlueCoatKarma]

I've kinda thrown myself into a high-res-ifying project involving the textures from NS (ns.wad and ns2.wad mostly). I haven't really done any texturing before (I did some VERY simple re-texturing for Deus Ex as well, but it was items instead of environment textures.) It's still nice because I don't have to be very creative to remake something.

The big obstacle here is that I can't do any 3D modeling, and I don't have a program to do so even if I could (which is a good part of why I can't.) Because of this, my normal maps are just Nvidia plug in affairs, and I haven't actually been successful in viewing these in Hammer (having problems with the .vtf/.vtm thing). For now just color layers, although I've done a normal map for the first of these.

So I'm looking for input on these. I'm struggling to get used to the idea that there shouldn't be much (any) lighting/shading "baked in" with the colors.

(Here's the old one):

Here's a vent. Having not really ever used normal maps before and not knowing much about them, this is the one that really needs help. Obviously some (all?) of the shading shouldn't be there.

EDIT: I just realized that the first one needs some explanation. We kinda decided that it needed to be cleaned up for Source - it would have looked to repetitive with such distinct features (the big metal hinges etc.) That's why there's a complete lack of them. Keep in mind that in NS textures aren't tiled all that much because walls don't usually go very long before being broken by details or supports or models or something.