First, Do you have a ground plane created? Second, if you do, you need to apply a material or color to it, a material could be any type picture you wish, bare in mind that the output of this picture can be scaled to your liking, like say you have a pic of some bricks, you want them to be applied to your ground plane, once you do that and then render it, only one or two bricks show up larger that all getout, you'll need to scale them down in your material settings for the bricks in order to get several dozen to show up. Least that is how I understand it to work. Check youtube for vids, there are a large number there showing a whole host of things you can do. The version has little impact to these vids, you just can't open a scene created in max 2013 with max 9.
(to clearify this, you can open scenes downward, not upward in max versions)