Normal Maps: Displacement Maps:

Normal is pretty blue-purple, and affects

the way light falls onto the object.

If you have something sculpted in ZBrush
and you have a normal map on a lower
resolution character, when light shines on
the model, it'll act like the divisions are
there.

Normal maps will never change the
silhouette of the geometry, though
(if you render an alpha, it'll look the same
w/ or w/o a normal map)


Displacement maps will actually perturb
your surface instead of being textural like a
colour map

When Maya registers a displacement map,
it won't display anything on the canvas, but
@ render time, when you have
displacement map applied, it'll basically
subdivide your geometry

Displacement maps are dependent on scale,
and thus are somewhat more
'unpredictable'


What is a Cavity Map?
Any time there's a crevice, a cavity map uses that info to make a dark area in a black
and white map so that when you later on have texture information (like if you drew cool
colour info on your channel) you can then plug a cavity map to get baked in light, or
ambient occlusion or w/e.
When it comes to our teacher, usually he'll get a colour map and lay an ambient
occlusion or cavity map on it, which displays on the mesh areas where darks exist.



Next New Thing in Tomorrows Tech: Vector Displacement Maps
Displacement is up/down but vector displacement can do more complicated shaping
things, like mushrooms with big undercuts on the side.














The difference between a normal map and a
bump map is the amount of information they
contain. A bump map works the same way as
a normal map in that it doesn't perturb the
surface of the geometry or affect the
silhouette, but a bump map only has b&w, and
can only go up/down, whereas a normal map
is an RGB image, so you have not just up and
down but the different direction of polygon
normals.