Disclaimer: I actually cant' remember if i found this link on this forum in the first place, apologies if I did, but the search returned nothing [SMILEY :P]
One way or the other, I stumbled on a link that might be interesting for some of you over here, apparently some clever minds at the University of Southern California for Creative Technologies (boy that sounds fancy) did some research and developed some machinery to acquire very good looking normal maps and more in an extremely low amount of time.
This itself is already pretty neat, but some of their rendering techniques to apply the normal maps to the meshes looked pretty interesting to me, and might be worth checking out. In all honesty I haven't read the paper linked due to a lack of time, but the video they've rendered out looks amazingly good! Major Kudo's to their off line renders which look really really good.
Lil' quote with image from the site itself:
[IMG #1 Image]
>> (a) High-Res face geometry obtained by embossing a specular normal map (estimated from polarized gradient illumination) onto a structured light 3D scan. All information was acquired in 13 photographs from two digital still cameras. (b) Real-time rendering of low-res face geometry with hybrid normal mapping for diffuse and specular reflectance. (c) Offline GI&SSS rendering using the high-resolution geometry and recovered diffuse and specular intensity maps.
Anyway, here's the link, hope it's somewhat usefull [SMILEY :)]
[LINK http://gl.ict.usc.edu/Research/FaceScanning/]
[IMG #1]:
![[IMG:#0]](images/c8f7e63cadd6191084b0db3b2eb0e1a2af65275ba7e9d3afd0e4717be82deaea.png)