Whilst buying materials is a nice way of having proffesional made materials, It's better to try and make them from scratch.
Making materials can be a bit bumpy but if you get a hang of how to making proper materials, you can make quite some sick ass stuff with it. I personally work with making projections/screenshots of how possibly a game can look thanks to making the proper materials for proper 3d models with the help of both C4D & Blender. It's quite a rabbit-hole when you start getting into material-creating.
As for your overall 3D-text work like the "Realists" one. I suggest you look into also making a custom-lightroom so your text looks more smooth & realistic with proper shadowing, this can also bring out the beauty with materials. Also when making animated signatures & rendering them, it is best to add a background to it, similar to the forum background so it gives the illusion of it being transparent. By adding a background to animated signatures you're basically forcing the .GIF file to compress the background more instead of the text, which makes the text less "sharp" compared to the original 3d model.
Overall good work as always RFD, glad to see you active again :)