I am working my way through “3D Game Textures: Create Professional Game Art Using Photoshop”. Although this book is aimed at Photoshop users, I decided to try and create the textures from within Blender. I.e. instead of trying to “fake” the ambient occlusion effects etc, I just created the 3D geometry for each texture and rendered it to an image I could use for UV texture mapping. I made good use of Blender’s material nodes to create the base metal texture.