I will give a little explanation on how I created this scene, and hopefully you will come away with some new techniques that I have used. I use 3dsmax but of course this can be applied to any other 3D software package.

I wanted to concentrate on the textures so the scene I decided to make was very simple. I always model my entire scene first before I do any texturing, I do this so if any changes or tweaks need to be made I can do them without adjusting any UV coordinates that I may have put on (left).

I try to model as simple as I can just to make life easier, I only put the detail where it is needed. Since I decided to use V-Ray to render my scene I used its very powerful displacement, so that helped me alot with the details wanted on the bricks and stones (below).

When I am done modeling I get my lighting about 90% where I want it with a gray material applied to everything.
I do this so I can see exactly what my light is doing. It helps me to get the look I want, and I get back faster test renders because there are no materials to process. I always have to go back and adjust it little when I get the textures done though because it may look slightly different with textures.

Now it is time to texture, I browsed the Total Texture CD's and found very good high rez textures that were easy to use. I had to paint very little textures for this scene because there are tons of great material on the CD's. By using the textures provided from the CD made it easy to do, especially the way they are organized.

To get the brick on the arches to follow the arch I decided to loft a shape and adjust the mapping coordinates in the loft parameters.

I painted a map to mask out the area where I wanted the brick exposed, then I painted a map where I wanted some grime, like drips from the beams and some dirt around the brick arches.

I used a mix map within Max to do alot of my textures. Here is an example of some Concrete I did

I always do a post work on my images, but for this image I only did a little bit on the water and the background photo, which was also pieced together from the many different reference photos providing on the Total Texture CD's

I hope you found some interesting and helpful tips in this brief tutorial.

This image was created using a few of the hundreds of textures from the Total Texture CDs - very comprehensive texture collections priced with the hobbyist in mind. To see more examples, download free
samples and read full details follow this link