How to do realistic battle damage

Thanks for the tips and and advice. I will practice on fodder pieces and hopefully can make realistic looking wounded Batman.

You should do all your sculpting first then worry about paint because whatever you sculpt with needs to stick to the plastic, if there is a layer of paint between the two, your sculpting might fall off easier. I've had it happen to me a couple times.

that might work, and the orer I would go in is material, flesh blood, so any paint or color from the material will be covered up by the lesh and blood colors

Thanks for all the advice. I truly appreciate it. So what I gathered so far is to use fixit sculpt as torn material of his costume and paint flesh and blood underneath and use the dremel to put holes in the plastic cape. Please bear with me cause I am still relatively new to customizing. Few more questions. Should I base coat the entire figure first then apply the technique of battle damage? Does it matter in what order I paint I.e. flesh tone first then the torn material. And lastly does the plastic material that the cape is made up of melt? Is it possible for me to take an exacto knife and cut lines into the cape and use a blow dryer to soften the plastic then when it is soft pull and twist to give the cape the "tattered" look. Thanks again guys.
For a newbie like me your tutorials and advice are the only reasons I can make any attempt at customizing.

you could also, after practicing on scrap, use the dremel with a bur or engraving bit grind into the armor, it will melt the plastic slightly and make it look torn up.

if you run yer dremel through the cape, tht will give you a hole, andsome texture though you might have to sculpt better tear texture

I'm not sure about doing it on figures but check out sites for doing model kits like gundam and that, they have good things on damaging armor and even figure kits. On TFW2005 they have battle damaging Transformer armor so it may help too.

try sculpting the torn bits of costume around the area you want to show damage, paint the inside of the area base in a flesh tone and whatever wound you want over top. The sculpting should add the necessary depth. I've done it and the past and am always pleased with the results