Before I put together the machine with the created and textured assets there was something worrying me about the clean look of everything. Although ambient occlusion shadows add a slightly dirty look (used to be called the dirt shader), I really wanted the models to sit well within the context of the Mill and pick up the slightly gritty dirty aesthetic, especially as it is situated on the 5th floor which isn't used as studios and has a lot of great old texture.
I found out by adding an extra material over the top of everything with an alpha channel and the diffusion channel (dark/light picking up shadows) with a quickly created dirt map I could make everything look a lot more worn and old. I made the texture with a few photoshop brushes and just added it to everything with a texture already applied, randomising the scale and offset so everything looks more realistic.
Also I didnt mention in the previous post - the monitors are all textured with a noisy video screen that animates. This is taken from video-copilots Riot Gear FX as a stock video element. I'm leaving the colour as the blue/teal as a contrasting colour to the warm brown/orange look of a lot of the models. I thought this would add a sense of the machine being powered as well as the physical animation of the elements. The sound design for this will also be very important and I have collected a wide range of sfx/recordings from freesound.org