Anyone have any insight on mapping streets, sidewalks, building fronts etc. and maintain good detail. Considering a poser character is the size of a human and uses 3 4000x4000 color maps, a map for a building would be a fraction of the relative size.

Best trick: use tiling.  This will make the model unusable in P4, but
it's remarkably economical.   Create an image of, say, a brick wall...
make it about 1/4 the height of one story.  Be sure the image is tilable.
Image generators like Genetica will create tilable patterns, or you can
use a number of other custom Photoshop tricks.

Then set the "mapping" pulldown of the image node to Tiled, and
adjust the U scale and V scale until it looks right.

If you isolate things like windowsills and doorframes as separate
material zones, you won't have trouble with the tiled image intruding
in places where it doesn't belong.

One potential drawback in tiling can be an obvious pattern in your rendered structure so watch out for that.

It's also possible to mix a procedural shader with a texture map that can help break those up.

Yes, you wouldn't want to use tiling on a large flat wall without
some kind of "interference".

What type of interference or procedural shader would one use?
By the way thanks for your response

Attached Link: Matmatic bricks

Yes, but your words bely what I see. I see a very regular repeating pattern.

Personally, I like to use 100% procedurals for bricks. They never repeat. And I can get a much higher level of detail.

Not saying you have to do it, but if you're interested, learn to use matmatic, and go check out the linked thread.

Here is a sample letting you compare image-based bricks with procedural bricks on the same building. I think you should be able to figure out which is which :)

Funny, I just had a conversation at Daz with some Carrara dudes. One of them asserted that he just uses a bigger image, even after I pointed out that you have to go to an image that is 40K to 100K pixels on a side to get this kind of detail.

The regular flemish bond pattern (particularly notice the blue bricks) is intentional; the original building has it as a deliberate decorative element.  As for repetition of the ordinary bricks, a bit more work on the texture can subdue that. 

I like the matmatic script bricks, though 54 nodes seems too many.  Can it be adjusted to produce this pattern:

http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=Prentis%20Store&w=all&s=int

There are also tricks in doing the modeling and actual UV mapping that can be very helpful. Looking at Ockham's house, you would definitely want to layer those walls on top of each other so they can take up as much space on the texture as possible rather than just leave them in the initial box mapping projection. Line them up carefully too. Nothing worse than mismatches in the mortar lines in a UV mapping job.

For Bagginsbill's building, you might take those brick columns and break them up by mapping and duplicating rather than sizing a simple cube the entire height of the building. Don't model to completion and then map. Think mapping as you are modeling.

Quote - The regular flemish bond pattern (particularly notice the blue bricks) is intentional; the original building has it as a deliberate decorative element.  As for repetition of the ordinary bricks, a bit more work on the texture can subdue that. 

I like the matmatic script bricks, though 54 nodes seems too many.  Can it be adjusted to produce this pattern:

http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=Prentis%20Store&w=all&s=int

Oh - duh - no wonder it repeats - because it does in real life. :)

54 nodes is a lot, and not entirely necessary. I don't remember what's in the brick shader exactly, but it had all kinds of adjustable effects. It is always easier to make more specialized versions with fewer nodes. Also, if you weren't going to be looking at it up close, a bunch of the nodes can simply be removed. They are there for fine details. For example, you'll never notice smooth mortar from a distance. If you can mess with Python scripts, it's pretty easy to modify the shader in matmatic.

Actually, now that I think about it some more, a few basic brick images, combined using nodes in interesting ways, could produce a very large non-repeating area while still relying on "photographs" for the details. Hmmm. No time to work on that now, but I'll put it on my list of future projects.

I'd go with what bagginsbill is suggesting.
Wherever you can, for brick and similar repeating patterns you want to go with a procedural shader. Especially a well made one which allows for some realistic variation. I haven't seen a shader from bagginsbill that wasn't well made :)

If you are going to use a tileble brick image, find or make onw with very little variation across the image. This will minimize the unrealistic part of the repeating look. Even with an image based shader, you can always throw on there a little bit of procedural noise that will vary bump or coloring. If the image map is too fuzzy, I would throw in a procedural sharpen node (I'm not sure if Poser has a sharpen node - I'm going on general principle and using half a dozzen different apps)

If you have any of stonemason's props, I'd highly recommend examining how is peces are UV mapped, and how his shaders are put together.

I'm working on anti-aliasing it. When you use image maps, texture filtering will take care of that, but for procedurals you have to use the Du and Dv nodes to figure out how big the pattern is on the screen, and do things differently.

I'll post it when I'm done.

Click the render to see it full size - observe the up-close detail, and also the complete lack of observable pattern from a distance.