Any Advice?

I think i may have to redo the characters chestplate. Anything i've done in the past 10 hours ive been sat here isn't working for this character at all. She either looks terrible, overdone or stretched and i have gone in and tweaked. I think the bottom of the breastplate is to complex. If anybody has any suggestions or help or any information on how i can possible get a decent looking texture going on this character it would be great! I'm stressing like crazy cause i've been at her for hours trina figure out why any normal maps i do look awfull LOL along with me having to use xnormal cause Max got assey with the render to texture technique :(. It's a shame cause all this time i'm putting into her just isn't showing in any of my work and I am really trying but struggling aswell cause of mudbox breaking on me (some sort of conflict i was reading up, i tried reinstall ect but can still only use the older version which sucks). I know i could have her done really soon i tried hand painting the texture but i'm not sure if that would be enough for a fmp project? I would think photographic images would be involved ect. Any advice would be great anyway I have looked around at how artists texture armour and it's all highly professional cg artists and half the stuff they do is blank to my mind and not really achievable unless i go back to modelling and thats time i don't have. @_@ I think my previous characters look more professional than what i've done with this character and it's highly disappointing because i really want to prove myself.

Anyway i can only try my best, i have tried several ways of texturing so far. Photographs look ok but still they just look really shoddy, unclean even if i do spend 4 hours shading out all the crazy reflections. I tried reflection maps ect. I think it could be coming down to the lack of a normal map. I don't get whats gone wrong but since my mudbox broke it's been a horrible pain in the ass with my normals i sometimes get the error during normal rendering too so i'm not sure if this is actually a issue. Crazy haha.