Texture Map Creation

Here's the shader network for the hero brick facade. It's a combination of texture maps and procedurals.I created the base brick texture map by beginning with a photograph of a brick wall, which I shot with a digital SLR with a long lens fairly zoomed in, in order to reduce lens distortion:
I then painted it in Photoshop to make it easily tileable, while minimizing the obvious repeating bricks by painting out the apparent clusters (e.g. a pattern of high-contrast bricks that was unique to a single part of the image.) I was primarily copying and pasting clusters of bricks and using layer masks to blend things into one another. This was more tedious than I'd anticipated, because I had to be sure to retain each individual brick's outline and make sure that no feathering between different layers was apparent. Finally, I adjusted the saturation with an Adjustment Layer so that I could retain the original painted image as well as the editability of the color correction.

I used a combination of Color Range selections, as well as Black & White and Levels Adjustment Layers in order to create the bump maps and specular maps. From top to bottom, here are the color, bump and specular maps:
The bump map is more consistent in contrast than the specular map, because the I wanted the brick to look like it was fairly consistent in depth once I rendered. The specular map has a wider range of contrast and is more sporadic across individual bricks so that I could help break up the glints of light in the render. The grout is darkest so that the specular highlights are nonexistent on those parts of the map.

The most time-consuming and difficult part of the texture map creation was the tiling; the bump and spec maps took literally minutes. Luckily, I won't have to creating too many other texture maps that show obvious repeats when tiled.