I started this project with roughly sketching out the scene on paper first. I knew I wanted to change
the color to sepia later, so I didn't have to worry about a colors cheme.

After I was done with modeling the scene, I browsed through the 3DTotal Texture CD's to pick up the textures and bump maps for the image.

It was easy to find the ones I was looking for, the selection interface is really great.
I saved them to disk, and started creating materials.

I hardly use plain bitmaps for my textures. Instead,I mix and modify them with shaders. This helps with quickly changing color, breaking up patterns, or adding the little extra to the bitmaps.
Working that way also lessens the blur of materials at closeups, because shaders are calculated and remain as sharp as you want them to be. On the otherway I could say I use bitmaps to break up uniform looking shaders.

For example I created a noise having terracotta colors, and blended it with a dirtmask from the 3DTotal Texture CD, and subtracted some other kind of noise to create my color channel.

I did something simmiliar for the bumb channel, using noise, and a bumb texture I got from the 3DTotal CD's.

The final material mapped onto the object looks like that:

I used the a material with the Cinema4D plugin DirtyNuts in the alpha channel on top of every material. This material shows up only in edges or cracks, where dirt would gather.
You could also simply use this in the diffusion channel of a material, but having it as a seperate material on top of another gives you more controle. There is a material with DirtyNuts in the alpha and a 3DTotal texture in the color channel on the cactus.

The ground is a plane displaced with a bumb texture from the texture CD's.

My computer here at home is slow, so it took forever to render, especially with all the layered textures. I rendered the picture with seperate masks for the objects, to allow me to modify them seperatly. Now I switched to Corel Photopaint.

I changed the color to sepia,tweaked the sharpness and contrast alittle , but let the flowers/plant on the left side keep a small amount of their color. Then I run some noise over the picture, saved it, and went to sleep for along time.

This was my first tutorial/making of ever, I hope you enjoyed it.

Thanks for taking the time,

Peer Draeger