Quote - I'm making couple of pieces right now, and have a fair amount of detail done as bump maps. (Fine clothing wrinkles, seams and similar minor details).

 

sounds awesome. that's not something commonly seen. seems that most people, if they put in seams either model them in (rare) or paint them into the texture.
 

Quote - The feedback I'm getting from some people is as if this is some sort of a super novel idea (it's not).

 

You would think it's not but compaired to many of the products out there now, it really is.

I picked up a product the other day that had baked in highlights and shadows for details in the texture and  used a desaturated version of the texture as a bump.

Quote -  The reason I'm asking is, if I'm overlooking a major disadvantage of bump maping, I'd like to know! 

 

I know there is potential for problems with displacement, but i have never heard of anything in bump maps causing problems.

Quote -  One plausible reason may be that for a lot of vendors, good part of their target audience is not comfortable with bump maps and/or uses the lowest render settings?
Any thoughts?

 

I think most of the target audience doesn't know how to use bump maps properly and when they decided to make something and sell it, they don't use them or do them incorrectly.

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