How are these kinds of textures rendered?

Thomas_Smith

This is a free texture from here: https://3dtextures.me/2018/10/04/sapphire-001/

Basically, I'm curious how this is rendered properly with height and depth to the render. Obviously if this texture is added to a sphere it will simply be flat. Is adding a bump map the correct way to do this?

jStins

You need a shader and renderer that support tessellation if you want the silhouette of the object to be affected by the height map. You can achieve a better sense of depth with parallax occlusion mapping if tessellation isn't an option, but that will only add detail to surface like a normal map and wont affect the silhouette. Displacement mapping is what you're after if you're using an offline renderer. 

Thomas_Smith

@jStins - perfect! Tweaked the tessellation & displacement values using a displacement map and that worked wonders. Thank you!