FreeGameDev

I'd suggest you check them out immediately! http://www.philipk.net/tutorials/materi ... rials.html

The tutorials, covering 8 different types of materials, are written for ZBrush and Photoshop, although the more or less the same results can surely be achieved with Blender/Sculptris and GIMP.

Pretty neat, but IMHO way to much work to make this kind of textures. Sure they might have much better normal maps than photo sourced textures, but unless you are payed to do this kind of work I really can't recommend this.

But I would be interested if you could actually make much better photo-sourced normal maps with these new high resolution 3D cameras...

But I would be interested if you could actually make much better photo-sourced normal maps with these new high resolution 3D cameras...

Who the hell has the money for 3D "cameras" :P

Yeah, just checked the prices. But for textures you don't really need one. Just shift camera a bit.

In fact I have just now done some research on that, and found a rather cool GIMP plugin to create depth maps from stereo images:
http://registry.gimp.org/node/10217

Can't test it right now, but tomorrow I will do some tests with it I guess. Still not sure how to do it exactly, but I guess a depth map should be usable as a bump-map to render a normal-map.

The result doesn't seem like it's usable to me, if my eyes do not deceive me. :P

Did you check it out, or just judging from the pictures on the site? Those are of course a completely different application, but maybe by bumping up the detail of calculation, it could be usefull in combination with a nomal-map creation plugin (like nvidias, or the gimp one).