Texturing a 3D environment

I textured my models after creating a very large amount of my city to help give myself a better idea of what it would look like when rendered. At first I used UVW unwrap and exported the templates to photoshop where I would create and then add my textures to the model in max however this proved difficult since it was hard to identify which face belonged to what part of the object without being able to see it in the environment. Thus I searched for an alternative and found the multi-sub option in max which allowed me to change the material ID of polygons in models and set them to whatever I wanted such as the interior being ID 4 and the doors as ID 3 allowed me to place two separate textures onto the same model, however these textures were hard to see and were stretched across the model, after looking around the materials panel I found the face map option that allowed me to place the texture on each face of the polygon giving my far higher quality textures on my models. I used this technique for the rest of my models in max and have had little problems with it.

For my textures I created all of them using photoshop mainly by adding colour, then noise to my image and then editing them using the filters and bevel and emboss settings at first it was difficult to create textures that seemed to go well with my models however the ones that did seem to work well I looked at closer and changed the techniques and colours used to create that texture slightly allowing me to add variety to my textures as well as improve the quality of new textures with what I have learnt.

To create my starry sky in max I used the environment settings in max I decided to create my own starry sky using the material editor, at first I used the noise map and then dragged it to the material editor as an instance of the environment map. I then edited it further by increasing the noise threshold and decreased the size to 0.2 this added an amazing clear starry sky to my scene. Under noise parameters I added another map under the first colour as a gradient ramp this added a black and white gradient to the environment that I could edit and change colours and by changing the noise amount, size and the type I was add a small blue streak to my sky.