>   I think people too often dismiss normal perturbation tricks because they
> can't get them look good, and the reason is that they don't know how to
> use slope maps.

I have put much time into trying slope maps, and I just can't get them to
look right. I fully understand the idea, but specifying both the height and
the slope at a certain point takes too much tweaking. For instance, I'll
often start with a low point that has a high slope and then put a higher
point with a lower slope. In my head, I imagine a steep surface turning into
a more gradual one. What I end up getting is a steep line, followed by a
slight downward incline, going back up into a gradual slope. This is because
I made the first slope too steep and the second point too low.

I feel like it would be easier to either specify only the slope or only the
height at each point, and rely on some sort of simple smoothing (like a
spline) to get good values inbetween. Or else some sort of editor would be
useful.

So instead, I generally just use functions to create greyscale "height maps"
that I use as normals.

 - Slime
 [ http://www.slimeland.com/ ]

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