Background Help

[Ascension]

I don't think that you're going to find large patterns of ruins. The best you might be able to find are patterns of pebbles and cracks and rocks and blricks and such. For elevations, well, darker colors are lower and lighter colors are higher so maybe airbrush in some colors and set the layer to overlay or soft light or something.

It would be most helpful if you could tell us what software you are using and also an example image of what you're aiming for so that we can understand better.

[Kihmbar]

I believe what you are looking to do is a larger scale of what I typically map. That being said, I usually take a concrete texture and "dirty it up" with cracks, mud, debris (bricks, steel, or stone), or other sci-fi effects. In GIMP - I make a base layer and fill it with a concrete texture and then add layers on top of it to get the desired "dirty" effect. [I would normally provide a link to textures, but my computer crashed a few months back and I'm just now getting it back online.]

As has been mentioned before, if you give us a image of what you're trying to do then we can be more specific in how to get your desired look.