http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/08/capturing_3d_surfaces_wit.html
What is this feature called and do we have any open source solutions yet?
You can make textures with bump maps, normal maps or displacement. There are features in Gimp and Photoshop that can gin up a bump map from a color map. You can model the texture in Blender, then bake it to a normal map.
My guess is that this technique uses 2d software to compare an ambient with a flash photograph. I’d suppose the spots where the lighting differed would define peaks and valleys, after compensating for the flash falloff. Gimp would be the open source solution, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Blender’s nodes could get this done, too.
Great, now there’s like three threads for this one subject!