Hello all! Since this is my first post I’d just like to say that from what I’ve read this is a fine community of Zbrush artists and I hope to become a fellow Zbrush user very soon :D. Now on to my question. I was hoping that I could get some clarity on bump maps and displacement maps really quick. To my understanding bump maps don’t change any geometry in a model and only give the illusion of depth by using a gray scale image map. That one seems pretty easy. Displacement maps confuse me a little though. It would seem that by using the same kind of grayscale image map a displacement map actually displaces geometry to match the topology of the map. Is it creating new geometry or does it just work with what you have? Also should displacement maps be used with normal maps in an animation setting, or would this be a needless use of processing power? For that matter can bump maps be used in conjunction with normal maps or would the normal map take care of the function of a bump map already? Whew sorry for the long-winded questions but I’m just trying to make my brain digest everything correctly. Thanks for listening!
Bump maps are grayscale images that allow a rendering engine to add detail to a rendered model by displacing points toward or away from the camera. For example, a golf ball can be a simple sphere, but thanks to the bump map it will appear to have dimples on the surface. Since the displacement is ONLY toward or away from the camera, though, the illusion starts to break down as the model’s surface angles toward the edges. That same golf ball, for example, would be revealed to be just an illusion at the edges because the object’s silhouette is perfectly round. Normal maps are full color images that give even more realistic results than bump maps because they change each rendered point’s surface normal. This allows light to interact with the surface differently and does an amazing job of creating details within an ojbect’s silhouette. Displacement maps are also similar to bump maps in that they are grayscale images. But these maps allow the renderer to move points relative to the point’s surface normal rather than just along the camera angle. This can completely change the silhouette of an object. As for what it does to the geometry, that depends on your rendering engines. Some engines displace the rendered pixels and don’t affect the geometry at all. Other engines divide the mesh at render time to get enough points for displacing. Other engines divide only parts of the mesh that need it to support the displacements. Still others require that the mesh be placed in a hypernurbs object so that it can be subdivided at render time. With all the options, you’re working with a low resolution mesh for animating. But from there it varies widely.
Thanks! This makes everything clear now. gee I used to think normal map is displacement map just by different name… how ignorant~ lol :lol:
Geez I can’t believe I didn’t thank aurick for his response.
Thanks aurick! The info you provided here has helped me for the past 4 years! 
And thanks kuroe for reminding me about this post.