Yeah, the warping is a uv problem I didn't have time to correct before I had to go to bed the other night. Basically texture wise I come up with an idea of what I wanted. In this case, wood. I then went into photoshop and drew a bunch of lines for the "planks" and broke it up by doing several vertical lines every now and then for new boards. The wood grain is from some colored noise with a directional blur, and distort thrown in. I then took all of that and used a series of displacement maps and grunge maps to dirty it up and distort the hand drawn lines to make them more natural (I use all natural grunge maps).

Although its not really evident, because I haven't messed with it much yet, the bump and specular maps were created by a serious of level calls on different layers.

And if you want any help Vectorman you can get ahold of me on Aim (glh3586) or something. I'd be glad to help.