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Well, it's just like any greyscale map - it could be handpainted, photosourced, procedurally generated, baked from a high ... anything goes really. You could look up Mari texturing tutorials perhaps, and old Gnomon DVDs covering character texturing for non-realtime rendering.

This artist did it through projection in Zbrush : 
https://texturing.xyz/pages/jonas-skoog-black-guy-making-of




And sure enough, the displaced details on Monsters Inc. characters where not sculpted but simply textured. If anything it keeps the designs streamlined and striking ...

I'm not entirely sure if you're suggesting to attempt to salvage a project by appending the contents of a file that can't be opened?

Sometimes it works, but when the RNA structure of the file is broken it'll likely fail and there's pretty much nothing you can do to salvage it other than relying on different backups.

I have ample experience in crashing and things going wrong. 😬 My suggestions are:

1. Keep the Auto Save on (Edit > Preferences > Save & Load > Blend Files > Auto-Save)

The autosave doesn't save over your working file, so technically it can't break it, it creates a copy in the tmp dir (Edit > Preferences > File Paths > Data > Temporary Files). Ideally this directory won't be purged upon system reboot so you're not toast in case of a power failure.

Set timer to something that won't overwhelm your system in case of large files. Another performance tip is that in case you have more than one disk and autosave is causing your operational system to lag then set the temp files location to a different disk altogether so it won't max out the I/O of the disk containing the OS, causing it to lag together with Blender.

Also, I'm not sure if these files have compression on but I noticed they tend to be smaller than the actual files you're working on, which is nice, without any data loss.

2. Also keep Save Versions on (Edit > Preferences > Save & Load > Blend Files > Save Versions)

That's the option that creates .blend1, .blend2 or more files.

Whenever you manually save your project the pre-save version of the blend file will be renamed to .blend1 or more. These files aren't smaller than the source file, they're 1:1 backups of what the file was before saving. They can be better than auto-save depending on the timer you've set. I just leave it at 1, it tends to be enough.

3. There's an incremental save option at File > Save Incremental.

That's good for when you suspect you might make file breaking changes so they won't get propagated to your save version backups and auto-saves.

4. Performance Tip 1: Turn Compress File on (Edit > Preferences > Save & Load > Blend Files > Default to)

Why? The impact on loading files is negligible, I never noticed it, but the impact on saving files can be huge.

Example: I have a project that's 10GB when uncompressed. Compressed it's 1.5GB. It's being saved to an old sata SSD, and the time spent saving it is drastically lower with compression on, shaving off one or two minutes of wait on every save. It's also easier on the SSD, and if you spend less time saving, you lower the chances of losing the file by having a power outage or something other catastrophe happening in the middle of an otherwise very slow save.

Unfortunately I can't speak for it making the file more or less easily salvaged by appending in case something goes wrong. I didn't notice anything worse in using it so far.

5. Performance Tip 2: Improve Blender responsiveness by using an Undo Memory Limit (Edit > Preferences > System > Memory & Limits)

If I remember it right it's unlimited by default. When you have some ridiculously large file like that 10GB one the undo can eat a lot of RAM, causing your system to swap/use virtual memory, which will slow down Blender considerably.

It's worth experimenting with limits, specially when you're trying to work on or rebuild a very large file. You have to keep an eye on the number of Undo steps in Edit > Undo History, because a lower RAM limit can easily reduce the amount of steps you're able to have in a file.

For reference I'm using 2000 at the moment (roughly 2GB), which has been working well on heavy sculptures, greatly improving the performance without eating too many steps. I should mention tough I'm using an addon for sculpt layers, so I get extra leeway to undo changes by working in different layers.

6. Performance Tip 3: The location of Blender matters

Sometimes changing the blender folder/install location can give you a small boost for the same reason it's good to change the tmp dir disk: So you won't max out the I/O of a slow disk.

Example: I have a couple of old sata SSDs + an NVME at the end of its life. Sadly I can't just mash the together to turn them into a nicer, faster, bigger disk, but I can alleviate a bit of the lag by keeping the OS in one of them, Blender, swap and blend files location in another and the tmp in the third disk (the sus NVME so when it finally dies it's no big loss). That has helped an old system with sad disks to cope with the workload by spreading the I/O calls. A more responsive system decreases the chances of being caught out by a catastrophic fail in the middle of a save that would break blend files.