Oh, you liar! Lol!

As for texture creation, you have the choice to use bitmaps or procedurals. I would say study the materials that ship with Vue to see how thy are done.

A good start in the function editor is to load a simple colour map, connected to a filter, connected to a fractal node. Then you can start apllying different fractal patterns, add turbulence to their origin, combine different fractal nodes. It's endless.

I suggest you watch jim Coe's tutorials about the function editor, they are made for beginers, but you may find them useful anyway:

http://www.art-head-start.com/free-stuff.html