This was an image to show off some textures. The textures started as vacation photographs (Japan and Thailand). Then I learned a new trick for making them into seamless tiles. The trick is to copy a selection four times and butt those together, clean up the seams then make a new selection in the center where they all butted. If the new selection is exactly the same size as the original, it will now tile seamlessly in what used to be the middle of the image. (I got this from the 3d Character Animator's Handbook.) For the wooden parts of the tank, by the way, I scanned a cutting board from my kitchen.
PhotoShop's distortion filters (spherical, perspective, skew) are helpful in flattening the image to the picture plane. The rubber stamp tool (in clone aligned mode) is wonderful for blending seams. But anyhow... Textures look best with bump maps. These can actually take longer than tiling; sometimes I have to hand-paint mine, using the original tile as a guide. The samples to the right were shot in PhotoShop itself, using the lighting effects filter.
The Ninja character (for the Poser 4 male) was created by dragon3dsystem, and is a free download at Renderosity. One of the poses here uses one of dagar's as a jumping-off point. Another is adapted heavily from Poser 4's "rooftop crouch." The wall behind the tank is David Runyon's. I smashed in the gate myself, using Ray Dream Designer's "Explode" morph. All the other models and textures are mine.

The tank was modelled in splines with negative booleans used to punch out the hatches. Then the faces were carefully detached in a polygon modeller, and spread out for best mapping in UV-mapper. The castle wall and the building behind David's gate were a combination of splines and primitives, exported as Wavefront .obj files for maximum utility. The rear building is detailed enough for an image of its own! That isn't the Bryce moon. It is a picture object, from a render of a Bryce-built moon, itself a sphere textured with some high-detail maps I made up for another image. Key light is a single spotlight above the moon. Fill light comes from three radials behind the camera, set for no fall-off and no shadows and with a value of 2. To get a deep enough shadow under the tank and under the eves of the rear building negative lights were used; radials with maximum fall-off and values of -8 to -12. The major "atmospheric" is a flattened volume sphere around the bottom of the tank, suggesting kicked-up dust.

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