Was able to get some of the techniques working, made a small box model to test on and have managed to get the rust texture showing up well, still have a few more steps before its anywhere near finished, also had a go at setting up some studio lighting in my scene as well using area lights and a spot light, think it went pretty well for displaying the piece! 

All textures used besides the custom painted alpha mask for the rust are supplied by Blender Guru from his tutorial and are for learning purposes only.

Recently watched another Blender Guru guide for adding rust to objects with textures and thought it would be worth giving a shot, I'll be using Maya instead of Blender though so it may become tough trying to translate things from one program to another, Will post updates showing progress once I've made some decent advances and understand everything I'm doing.