Latest topic of this thread: Texture work!
Two years ago I decided to work with textures on 120 x 120 plan. That was little scenes, quick to render, and so, funnier to do (big scenes take forever to render with my antique computer).
Before I start, I must say that I can't share the bitmap textures. I collected a lot of surface's pictures since 2 years... Via a lot of differente sources. A good part of it is free to use and modify (creative commons), but some of them are not. And as my storage system is an incredible mess (I've already said that, I know), it's all mixed / jumbled.
So, I can't (and don't want) take the risk to share a texture that was made from a no-creative commons picture.
All that said, make a tiled texture is not very difficult. There are plenty tutorials on the internet. And you can find superb surface's pictures via google, Flickr (my favorite, with CC's search option), cgtextures, or other sources. The (faked) bumpmap is a little more tricky to do, but, if you want, we'll talk about it an other time.
For now just a precision: I'm working with 2000x2000 pixels textures.
First thing, testing a texture on an environment (1 texture, 1 terrain):
After that I've started to work on a small scale (120 x 120 plan), with an unique texture, to "calibrate" it (levels and sharp in postwork):