For tiling textures you often just model out a small section of it as highpoly and then bake it down to your texture space. There isn't really any reason you "cant use normal maps" for certain types of textures, any situation where diffuse/spec works normal maps should work fine too as well. You will model your lowpoly a…
So I just discovered the basics of baking in a High polygon mesh into a low one. But than I realized when using texture sheets where you share textures this method cannot work, unless you were to use multiple material IDs in game. My current method for a scene are to use one giant texture sheet that contains maybe 8 or so…