Thanks so much for your comments! That's really heartening (is this the right word?).
Here is a more detailed description (especially for Greg
) on how this model was done.
What you see is about six instances of the original model put aside to each other. They are rotated in 90° steps to avoid repeating patterns.
The model was made inside of Max out of a simple plane with (as far as I remember) about eight polys per side. I used the first instance of the greeble modifier, which creates a certain amount of square shaped structures with adjustable height and tapering. Additionally it adds smaller structures called widgets that have the same parameters you can use. For each creation of structures you can assign as many material groups as you like which are distributed randomly to each newly created structure.
I used three instances of Greeble each one creating new structures on top of the structures of the previous instance. As you can imagine this leads to a quite detailed model.
In Max I put a UVW mapping modifier with box mapping on top of the modifier stack and assigned a simple multi shader (without any textures - only coulors) to the model.
I then exported the whole thing as an .obj (which took quite some time!) and reimported the mesh into TG (which took seconds!). I opened the internal network of the model and found my multishader with a certain number of "subshaders". Then I only had to put some textures into the slots of the diffuse color, the displacement and the opacity. I used some textures with alpha maps which created even more details, so opacity was very important here.
I hope my description was halfways understandable. Feel free to ask if there are any questions.
