The scene consists of four essential components: the stairs and balcony, the sculpture, the illumination and finaly the complex texturing.

In 3D Studio MAX I opened the front view of my scene and pressed "Print Screen", to copy it to the clipboard. Then I started Photoshop and opened a new file by pressing "Ctrl-n". Then, presssing "Ctrl-v", I copied the clipboard's content into the new file. I cut off the unneccessary parts, which left me with what you can see on the left.

Then I began browsing the TotalTexture CD's. I was looking for some concrete and some brick textures to put on the walls. I blended them over the frontview and adjusted them until they fitted perfeclty.
Photoshop's "Burn"-tool is perfect for adding effects to the textures that - allthough they can be very subdued at times - are noticable in your final image. You can add shadows, where objects meet or around cracks and dents, put stress on a special area of your scene and so on. But remember, it is easy to overdo, so be careful with it. It will be a very good friend, if you are.

On the left you can see the front view with all textures blended over. They are good, but even though I have burned the textures here and there, they still lack this special "je-ne-sais-quoi". And this is where TotalTextures' Dirt Maps kick in!

One of the things that often unmask a picture as being rendered is the fact that they are too clean. No more. If you allready have a texture for, let's say, a wall, but you feel that it is too tidy to be real, chose a second texture and a Dirt Map. Now, in your favourite 3D-Package you can use the Dirt Map as an Alpha-Mask.
The 3D-Package will show your primary texture, where the Dirt Map is white and the secondary texture, where the Dirt Map is black.

I chose a slightly different method for this scene, though. I picked two of the various Dirt Maps from TotalTextures and blended them over the texure maps. This is a more faint way of "messing up" your tidy textures, but it works just as well.

To do that I opened the Dirt Maps, I had previously picked and copied them into own layers. One layer for each of the two maps. I arranged the layers so that the dirt maps sit above their respective texture maps (down_dirt above down_brick_wall, up_dirt above up_wall - see image on the left for details).
Over the upper wall's concrete texture I blended a subdued speckle. The layer settings were 100% and the mode was Multiply.
The lower wall's brick texture was partially covered up by a somewhat stronger dirt map. The layer's Opacity was 85% and color burn the mode.

On top of all of these maps I placed another texture representing the door in the upper right of the final image. I applied Drop Shadow and Bevel and Emboss effects to it. Take a look at the final image - doesn't the door look as if it was modelled? Well, it wasn't. :)