I'm currently thinking about autogenerating Normal, Specular and Heightmaps for Textures for use in shaders. Normalmaps seem to be quite easy so far, as there are the engine function bmap_to_normals and some other codes for it out here. Heightmaps should be easy to create, too, although I don't really know how to do it. I think the blue channel of a dot3 normalmap could be already seen as "sort of a heightmap". This wouldn't be the perfect solution but at least a solution. For having a better map I think the length of each "pixel normal" has to be calculated out of the normalmap, or am I wrong here?

But for gloss/specularmaps I have no idea, how to generate them, of course there can't be really a clue to the specularity of a material found in the texture.
I thought of bmap_to_alpha here. This would create an alpha channel depending on the pixel's brightness, right? So it would be in the last case some kind of gloss map (with fantasy )

Any other ideas how to make it better?

how to make it better? i guess doing it for every texture by hand would be best

Yes that's clear to me, that's not the problem. I said at the beginning I'm searching for ways to generate those maps automatically, of course they won't be as good as made by hand or with a professional graphics program. I just wanted to hear your opinion on the ideas I had so far.

uh, for specular you could apply the texture to the model and then generate a spec map based on some lighting at a certain angle etc. That's more or less what spec maps are. Fake lighting effects.

You can't really "automagically" generate these kinds of things, they are very much artist driven.

I'm always looking for such a tool which generate those
maps and preview them on screen instantly, something like
the tools from DB Pro. I would like to pay for it if someone
can create such tool.

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This is a great idea if you want your lighting to look like crap. Sometimes you can get away with converting a regular texture to a normal map, but normally only for organic rough textures like dirt or grass.

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Well dirt and grass are exactly the sort of texture I need this generator for

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The blue channel of a normal map gives you the slope, not the height

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But if it gives the slope then it wouldn't be that great deal to calculate a height out of it. You figure out a base height (could be the heighest or lowest point of the map but actually I have no idea how to find it), and then you could calculate the height of every other point depending on the difference of the slope to the previous point. Does this make sense or do I get it wrong?

Imagine a metal door with a few letters in a bright color on top of it. If you create normalmap and spec-map automatically then the letters will shine and will appear dented / bumped. That is not what you want.
Because of that I create those maps manually via different layers in GIMP.

Actually, all of these effects can be generated, but like I've said in another post, you need 3ds max to do it. You simply paint your texture in a paint program, create a plane in max, set the lighting the way you want it and then Render to Texture which bakes the effects into a finished texture. You can also bake the images seperate ie., Height Map, Specular, etc.

I know Max is expensive but it is very much worth it.