Maya paint effects and render testing part 1

I decided to play around with Maya's paint effects tools to mock up a quick environment scene basically to play around with rendering techniques and image based lighting:

firstly creating a plane. I just wanted a simple dirt plan with a relatively seamless pattern of dirt on it. I found out if you play around with the texture in the 2Dtexture tab you can edit the direction of it and how often it overlaps etc just by playing with the slider values (right side of image):

Next I discovered that in order to make the paint effects paint to a flat surface you first select it then go to the 'generate' drop list at the top of the screen and click 'make paintable.' once this was done I started to mock the scene up using the visor panel which can be found under general editors or in the generate droplist:

After this I went to reduce my plants polys down to about 2million as they contain a lot of polys making Maya become considerably laggy :/ first you have to convert the Paint Effects to polys though. I tested a first render with sun and sky and it looked like this (bleh):