Autodesk Maya - Texturing an Alley

We were given an ambient occluded model of an alleyway and our task was to texture it all using photo shopped textures onto the unwrapped UVs. This method of working was very interesting to learn and I found in an actual enjoyable way to texture a model. Since I use photoshop to a large extent using it was a good way of creating textures. The process was rather smooth with the only issue being when I didn't order the layers correctly. However I do not see this working particularly well for organic models as mudbox or zbrush may work better. Yet I shall not discount this straight away.