"*Curious if anyone knows how many megapixals is necessary to get decent resolution on  digital photos for textures.  ATM I have access to a 5.0 and 8.0 I think - that enough or do we need to splurge for yet another camera?"

*That rather depends on just how detailed you want your resulting texture to be.
Consider:
A 1024x1024 image is just over 1 mega-pixels in size.
A 4000x4000 image takes up 16 Megs.

However, you're probably not going to need 4000x4000 unless you're going for extreme close-up, and anyway the result will be distorted as it gets stretched/squished when applied to the texture.

Use smaller photos, and clone bits over the texture instead (you can clone parts of the original texture in different places on the texture - no-one will ever notice..)

And if you're not doing extreme close-ups, then you don't really need to go down to "pore-level", the detail will be lost in the rendering/anti-aliasing.

The BIG thing to remember is: DON'T USE JPG if the camera has options to save in lossless format (tiff, png etc.). As soon as you save in jpg, detail is lost...

So even your 5.0-meg camera should be good for a few textures at 1000x1000...

Cheers,
Diolma