Fugazi1968 opened this issue on Aug 06, 2009 · 96 posts
pjz99 posted Thu, 06 August 2009 at 7:39 PM
One big reason for normal maps' popularity is NVidia's .DDS image format, which includes a channel for normal map data.
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/photoshop_dds_plugins.html
Like Bagginsbill I don't really see a an advantage to using normal maps over bump maps, as neither can actually disturb the profile of the geometry the way a displacement map can. My fundamental technical understand is a lot weaker (like, zero) though.