Originally posted by Chirone normal maps and bump maps are essentially the same the only difference is that normal maps are faster to render because they've gone through a pre-processing stage hmm, not quite. its normal maps dont get re-processed when rendering true, but a normal map has 3 channels, and bump is grayscale. a lot more can be done with normal maps than just bump mapping but the 4 most common maps when rendering still images are diffuse, ambient, specular diffuse/map, and bump/displacement/normal maps.