In building custom bump displacement maps, I noticed that the maps in the Visualize library are colored. For example:
However, the color scheme looks to be based on incident light angle. I would have thought that Visualize reads a height displacement as a "temperature" in a "heat map"; high parts the reddest, low parts the bluest. But that doesn't seem to be the case. So,
1) What do the colors represent? and,
2) How would I incorporate the color schema into a custom made texture using, say, Photoshop?
3) Do gray-scale bump maps work as well as the colored schema bump maps?
This is a normal map. A normal is the direction perpendicular to the center of a face, or can be averaged to a single vertex from the adjacent vertices.
Basically it fakes geometry by adding normals that don't exist on the original object.The colors are related to the change in angle. Don't ask me to explain the math
Its possible to convert grey scale image to normal maps, how useful it is depends on how the grey scale image was created. If the greys represent elevations from a surface then the results should be fairly good.