Thanks! Glad it's helping people
Not sure what you mean about photo realistic game props.
They're quite easy-ish to make but require quite a lot of tweaking and map creation to get the values just right (Crysis). This differs from digital painted style textures which take quite some time to paint, but can be 'messy' to get really nice results (Dota 2).
I'm a fan of the middle ground realism where you can make it realistic, but appealingly cheap at the same time (Assassin's Creed). That's the look I'm going for with this project