Good job, Scrat, it's really coming along nicely.
I think Blender is fine for texturing - to be sincere I am not sure anyone using Blender is using something else to texture. Everything you've seen on this forum from me and anaho was textured in Blender.
Before you start on texturing, if you wish to learn about it, there are 2 things I must stress:
- Learn about texturing using
Cycles render (it's still within Blender). The method is different from the "Blender Internal" rendering engine. A convenient windows setup (in my opinion is to split into 3 windows a/3d viewport b/UV-image editor c/Node Editor. a/ shows your model, b/displays the unwraps and can show how your textures overlay on the unwrapped mesh c/the node system in creating materials is very handy. Blenderguru's introduction tutorials on Cycles and Creating materials with Cycles are highly recommended.
- Practice UV-unwrapping for basic stuff first (cube and cylinder unwrap), I think UV-unwrapping gets easier with practice (and then more practice).
If you need image sources, most of what we have comes from
cgtextures.com (one of the few places that offers a large bank of textures for free). A good place to get supplied.