I'm amazed by the models you guys are working on  - there's so much detail!.  I still have trouble modelling even simple shapes with polys or nurbs and can't model anything organic to save my life.

Just an update on my books while I'm here-
The texture on the book on the left is an image map made with PSP.  The texture on the right is completely procedural.  The cool part is that it's now macro-ized so I can give it either a file name for an image mapped texture or the base colors of the cover and the font and words of the title and it will automatically create a procedural texture and scale it to fit - don't have to worry about long words or too many lines of text running off the edges!

I can't do anything fancy with the procedural like mix fonts or text sizes or add symbols, but for lots of books on a shelf in the background, it's (hopefully) good enough and hundreds (each with different titles & colors) can be created in a matter of minutes. Well, at least no longer than it will take to type in the names of hundreds of books, lol.