IMHO bump maps and normal/displacement maps should really have two different uses.

Bump maps I'll use for small detail.. skin pores, woodgrain, cloth textures, that sort of thing.

Normal maps and displacement maps I see being more useful for enhancing mesh detail sculpting level without adding polygons. (Similar to what they do in most games now.)

That said, is there any clear advantage/disadvantage you see when comparing just normal maps and displacement maps? If I recall, Daz studio did not support normal mapping, but thats ben added since then, so that was a disadvantage to normal maps in poser content back then.

I think another big issue back then, was displacment mapping needed a tricky node setup to get properly, and normal mapping just needed a simple 1.0 setting, so normal mapping was easier for end users to create.

But I recall someone saying the normal mapping was an improvement over displacement mapping for some reason, be it speed, final render quality, shadows, or something along those lines. (One thing I reall was creating normal maps in external utilities like zbrush was easier then creating displacement maps, since you could get the proper 3d displacement amount easier than with actual displacement maps.)

It might have just been someone's personal preference, or the fact that normal maps are a more portable format, since game engines could also take advantage of the normal maps, vs the more common poser displacement maps, which could not be used in a game engine.

So my question was more normal map vs displacement maps. Odds are I'd still use a bump map for small details in combination with one or the other. Or just keep the small detail in the superior displacement map, vs using a combo of normal maps and bumps maps to reduce memory overhead, since the displacement maps retains that small detail better.

 

Way too many people take way too many things way too seriously.