Originally posted by elephantinc
Ive been meaning to ask that for so long now, and since were on the subject.....
i was wondering this myself, and it's something i'm going to have to find out... well... i could leave out displacement maps and just refer to norml and bump maps
but, a bump map is where you use a single channel (greyscale) to determine where a bump should be
bump maps don't actually add any geometry or adjust any geometry, they just tell the renderer how to colour that particular pixel
a displacement map actually changes the geometry on rendertime.
To quote wikipedia "to cause an effect where the actual geometric position of points over the textured surface are displaced, often along the local surface normal, according to the value the texture function evaluates to at each point on the surface"
why you would use displacement map instead of bump map or the other way round is still a mystery to me... i think it would depend on the grapgics engine your work will port out to. i dont think the Steam engine supports displacement maps, but it does support normal maps
and sorry Rhetoric, i dont know any tutorials using displacement maps... havent seen any, its all bump or normal mapping
but then... i havent looked for any 
that's a "Ch" pronounced as a "K"
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