Today i found a quite interesting tool.
It's called ShaderMap 2. It can ganerate Normal, Displacement, Specular, AO by using a normal picture.

Compared to the quite well known CrazyBump, it creates the same results, but is cheaper and still in active development.

Thought you might be interested in something to get yourself such maps for rendering.
(my example below uses one of Winows' examplepictures, this one is a quick one)








and how it looks i.e. in NeoAxis:


Their page:
http://shadermap.com/home/

edit:
OH, and editing normals is quite handy, too
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcASXxF7Dvo

greetings
Rackscha

cool, thanks, I'll need soon something similar...

but sadly, simply generated heightmaps & normalmaps suck. (especially the heightmaps)

well... yeah, in some cases the generation algorithms can produce decent normalmaps but making them "by hand" (you don't actually hand-paint EVERYTHING)
is still the best method.

I once made an example, guess which of these was generated

(click to view in full size)

...and regarding generated displacement/heightmaps: just don't use them, please.

Can you send me the texture? Would like to try it out on yours.

And which tool did you use here? Most just use a plain grayscaled images which results in bad normals.