How to add more variety on a ground plane (texturing)

Dissendior

I always come to this point from time to time so maybe somebody can give me a tip: I have a concrete ground in a car mechanic workshop and added the concrete shader I've found with daz studio. I find the diffuse texture from this shader actually not so bad... it is big enough and has no seams so that when an image is rendered with a camera angle where you see more of the ground it looks okay. But I see it in many renders from daz: the ground looks too perfect, too clean. And every time this happens to my renders I wonder how you can add more variety to a ground. For outside scenes I put some grass and stones on a ground plane but in a factory hall or workshop I can not put many objects on the ground. I need to add imperfections to the concrete ground, oil and water stains, pathways of dirt / mudd, drains, things like that.

Can I mix different shaders somehow? Or are decals the way to go (it's just a buzz word to me, I don't know how to use decals...)? For drains: do I need to actually model them into the ground model? I read something about procedural shaders but until now I only know this from Blender and the shader editor there working with nodes but so far I did not realize that there is something like this in DazStudio?!

NorthOf45

Studio has a 4-layer Uber PBR MDL shader (shader presets/iray/daz uber/4-layer uber pbr mdl.duf), but I don't think I've seen any presets for it. You would have to copy individual texture bitmaps from other shaders into the appropriate channels. Kind of awkward...

There is another free multi-layered shader Muelsfell Multilayer Iray Shader LITE  to get a taste (and it's full-featured big brother Muelsfell Multilayer Iray Terrain Shader)

There is also: Oso Blendy Two Layer Shader for Iray, or Environment Blend Shader

There are a number of shader preset packs that add grunge, dirt, scratches, and other contaminants to surfaces. A few examples: 

FSL Weathered Shaders for Iray, Layered Grunge Iray Shaders, Layered Grunge Iray Shaders 2, KRDX Dirt FX and more.

And, as you mentioned, decals. Several packs of those, too.

crosswind

Technically, yes, you can mix different shaders by using a similar node-based Shader Mixer in DS. The above-listed 'multi-layers' shaders were mixed with such too. The mixed shader could be deconstructed and saved as user-facing shader preset what you can see on Surface pane.

But using Shader Mixer requires some knowledge of MDL and techniques to a certain extent...It's learnable but only not that easy like what you do with shader nodes in Blender.

Dissendior

Thank you guys, this already was very helpful for me