Hello!
I made a small tutorial about "heightmaps" at my webpage. The tutorial is a bit out of date, so I thought I should do some test-renderings again.
What was really surprising for me:
I many cases, even Displacement-Renderings are faster than Bump-Map-Renderings?

At the end of the post you can download the projectfile with textures, infos and the rendered versions.

I used 3 camera-angle with 3 similar models with different maps applied to them(bump, normal, displacement).

Something what was a bit odd:
Look at the TGAs I rendered out. There are some black parts when i rendered the normal-map-model. Is the normalmap wrong? I made it with the nvidia-plugin for photoshop. Maybe someone could tell me what is wrong there?

-> Download the files

*Fuchur*

1. i think your "bump_front_0.tga" is not actually a render of the bump mapping, it shows displacement ..

2. looking at your normal map it definitely looks wrong:
the faces of the squares are flat, so they should have the exact same color as the background in the normal map, but they look almost black .. obviously the nvidia plugin does something very wrong here .. i've actually never seen black areas in normal maps before (see http://www.bitmanagement.de/developer/cont...oneBumpDOT3.jpg for instance)

of course you are right... I did refresh the file...

If you take a look at the textures you can see the normal-map and the dis/bump-map...
The rendering itself is a bit odd...

Is there another plugin for normalmaps?
*Fuchur*

yes, i meant the normal map texture. it doesnt look right.
maybe it is a problem with the settings?
i have opened your disp map in photoshop and the nvtools (v6.57) produced this (good) result
[attachmentid=19140]
with these settings
[attachmentid=19141]