Does anyone know of any techniques, filters, tutorials, etc. that might be helpful in recreating a realistic  painted surface in Photoshop?

 I'm creating texture maps in Photoshop for buildings. Some areas of the buildings are flat, single colors. First I fill the area with the color, but then need to add some "texture" to the area to make it look more realstic simulating surface texture, weathering, etc. Using the noise filter helps but I'd like to have more control and more options. For example, it would be helpful to be able to change the grain size of the noise.

Attached Link: Building a Weathered Texture

Your not really saying exactly what type of weathered material you want. I myself use mask on the color layer nd fibers. and a bunch of  different Photoshop filters. Here's an example PSD zipped file I did in about 15 min. I name some of the layers with the steps to achieve the effect desired. Hope this healps to get you started by brekng dow the steps and layers of the PSD. I'm too busy to go into  big explanation but if you need help on a part leave a message.  Good Luck    Schurby

Attached Link: Filterforge

I love filterforge for that kind of stuff, lots of filters for it to create old paint, wood, weathered or no, bricks, stones, metal, rust etc etc...

 Cool. Thanks for the responses. I should have described it better. The surfaces I'm thinking of are very plain. For example, a flat metal security door, relatively newly painted, with minimal or no weathering. Or on interiors, a painted plaster wall with no defects that appears as not quite flat color. So basically surfaces mostly painted that just have a subtle, "regular" texture and need something to distinguish them from the computer color fill look.

I got this only by starting out with gaussian generated noise and then using the render filters that already come with Photoshop. Only the cloud filter had to go on another layer. Looks like rough-hewn stone, huh?

If you keep doing different layers and playing around with channels and mixers, you can get all kinds of interesting textures.

---EDIT---
Found a link for another freebie goodie for bricks. In case you need to save money or don't know a quick way to do it procedurally in other software:
http://www.acmebrick.com/md/index.htm

I seem to be quite good at making textures. Especially old beat up textures, weathered and stained. The basic way I do this is that I have a huge texture collection for grunge, painted, dirty whatever I need. I use these photo as new layers above the texture I want to paint. I then apply these in various ways using the layer apply tools. Sometimes multiply works best. Sometimes overly. Or changing the texture layer to grayscale and applying it in one of several ways. It takes experimentation, and fiddling with the opacity. I usually know just how to apply the layers, but that's from several years experience and the fact that I make LOTS of textures. Most of the time I feel the need to make completely new textures for any scene I do in Max. I have several gigs of maps in my library, and at least a gig of photos waiting to be made into maps in my photo files.