Lightwave/Texturing: Good procedural settings to produce weathered paint and stains?

SebastianP

First off: I'll admit it, I'm scared of Photoshop, I can't draw worth a damn, and while I've tried both 3D Coat and Zbrush, they don't really agree with my models, which either have way too many N-gons or a gazillion triangles. But I'm fairly at home in Lightwave, and I'm getting to like playing around in the node editor to create stuff like anti-skid coatings and things.

I'm working on a large set of spaceships (seventeen or so different *base* models, some with multiple variations) which are supposed to be painted like real-world ocean going warships, i.e. haze gray sides and dark gray decks. Since there are so many of them, I'd like to avoid having to make full UV maps for all of them unless I'm actually doing something more complicated than a single color, and instead create a set of materials I can just slap on to the ships and make them look good anyway. I've gotten a bunch of surfaces down now, but they all look mostly new - I want to add random grease stains and skidmarks and stuff to the deck, and some subtle wear to the painted sides, without having to resort to Photoshop if possible. (If I can do it with procedurals, just changing the settings a tiny bit would be enough to create a whole new pattern without having to create a new image map, reducing the number of files to keep track of...),
Does anyone have any good tricks for this? Or, if all else fails, know of a decent written tutorial for doing such things in photoshop (brush styles to use, etc)?