Quote - Second Life uses them to deform simple prim (primitives) into amazing shapes. The same might be possible in Poser pro, and some thing cool, is that tecxtures can be animated, and that might open up a lot of interesting possibilities.

SL just uses the wrong terminology. Those arent normal maps, but what is called vector displacement maps. Regular (scalar) displacement like that used in poser and most 3d apps only uses greyscale info to do the 'pushing' of geometry. It is always along one single direction, which is along the normals of the geometry. Vector displacement OTOH lets you specify not only the amount of 'push' but also the direction. Which is what lets you sculpt the object out of a primitive in second life (in a limited way of course)

Regular normal maps as used in games are just baked bump maps. ie a bump is done on a mesh and the resulting normals are stored in a file. This way in game, all you have to do is read the file to get the same effect and can avoid the costly calculations involved in doing bumps. Even in UT3, if you take a screencap and examine carefully at the edges of models you can see where the illusion fall apart. It's just very beautiful ZBrush work so you cant tell immediately.

Dunno which version Poser pro will support though as vector displacement requires some fancy rendering techniques. Would be nice if it did of course as you can do all kinds of cool things with it like scales and hair for example.