I am moving on to trying to understand how to get the asset I have bought looking their best.
It would seem that this is down to shaders.
I have gone off and read about what they all mean, but I cannot find a guide / tutorial that goes through how to make something look better.
For example, if someone asked me about making a photo look better in PS, I might tell them about capping the levels.
Just found this example:
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/58071-Improving-Graphics-Quality-of-my-Game
It would be helpful to see a screenshot of what you think needs to be improved. But absent that, I think in general textures and lighting are more important than shaders.
The input for a shader is the texture (and normal map), so garbage in/garbage out on that score. If your lighting is flat, your scene will look flat, too. Personally I like dark darks, so I keep ambient lighting to a minimum. Experiment with different color ambient/scene lights, too.
Interesting. I am, currently, playing around with shaders and making all sorting of funny sounding maps with CrazyBump.
I have the unitycar package, which comes with a pre-built city made of photo realistic images.
To try and learn I thought I would use this as base to try and improve; for sure, the textures are only average (not knocking it).
It seems that Unity wants maps that are slightly different than the ones that CB produces, even though they are called the same type.
So I am ending up with mixed results. I am now saving lots of slightly different types of maps, as CB doesn’t saving the settings and I cannot find an OS X plugin for PS.
I still find moving around the 3d space in Unity far harder than other programmes, fortunately a Wacom makes it a lot less painful 
Oh, and once I get my head around Textures and Shaders, time to take onboard lighting.
Unity can create bumpmaps from grayscale. I’ve started using that feature in order to save numerous steps since I’ve found myself frequently adjusting the bumpiness of the maps.
Oh lordy, what a day!
I have read the documentation, again and again.
The only way I can get the model to look better is to use Diffuse Detail with a normal map; which is not how it is supposed to work as far as I can see.
I have tried all of the others, have made greyscale and let Unity convert, I have inverted them, nothing seems to work as the documentation shows. I cannot get depth, just keep getting perturbations, even though DD works, just not as it should.
I am betting the hit of DD is too great that I can just dump it on everything, but I am going to try
Show us some screenshots, then we can help.
Yep, I will do.
Getting there. Have made a greyscale and an inverted one.
I then used PS to enhance B&W dramatically.
Now, when I do either PD or PS I can see a difference from BD and BS.
I am presuming that I will only see the difference between PD and PS at run time.
As for DD, hmm, all though it does make a dramatic difference, on some of the models it looks way too over the top.
These show the effects of the three different shaders.
You should be able to see that the normal maps and greyscale show that I have b&w right, even if its not showing as such.
Okay, for starters, the Diffuse Detail shader shouldn’t have a normal map in the Detail slot. That’s supposed to have a grayscale image:
http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Manual/HOWTO-UseDetailTexture.html
Edit: Just reread, looks like you knew that…but the normals look messed up on that one. Looks like your light is overhead. Notice how the highlights are on the bottom of the windows instead of on top?
You mean the light in the game?
Not even played with that yet!
What is you opinion about which one looks more real please?
I am sure I should be but I like the DD one best still
