A new demo showing normal mapping...
Its a torso model that is 700 polys from an original 300,000. The map is screwed up, but I believe the effect is obvious... Gives the illusion of many polys, when in reality his chest and abs are flat and flat colored... The shader code is from Matt Aufderheide...(Thanks!)
This is the demo that will be included with the tutorial Im working on for applying perpixel shading and creating Normal maps for it... This demo is very raw and obviously flawed, Im having a tough time with smoothing groups and/or texture baking the maps (seams and hard edges)...

Get it and the Tutorial here...
Tutorial and Demo

looks really great, cant run it right now, cause of my old pc, but i ll test it tomorrow. nice to know that you are making a tutorial for this

poly-bump,huh?
apply normal mapping with offset mapping will take a better result.

wow... this is really getting interesing.
"...seams and hard edges..."
even so, this shader biz is promising to shake things up BigTime!

thanks again for sharing your progress with us 'mere mortals'

wtf why are you talking of polybump ? isnt that a crytek-technique that has nothing to do with 3dgs ?

poly-bump is just per-pixel lighting with normal map,right?
some additional tech like offset-mapping will make it look better.

awesome stuff drew, im eagerly awaiting your tutorial. And those cwazy boxes dont show up on your demo that show up on all your splash images ( maybe you didnt put them in? I dunno)

yeah thats strange, they are supposed to be there, they were to show Newton physics and perpixel working together... Wait until I attach a per pixel light source to a light on a chain with projected shadows...

Working on the tutorial now, hard part is that the technique Im using is a work in progress, so Im hoping the tutorial will be open to improvement by everyone...

Polybump refers to two things...
1) The crytek tool for normal mapping , which actually does a fantastic job in the normal mapping pipeline, but its a Demo. Otherwise it would be a key part of my tutorial....
2) Polybump is another name for bump mapping and normal mapping, based on crytek's tech descriptions. Most likely the first time people are learning about the tech, nice how crytek mangaed to angle it that way, smart...

It looks great! One bad thing is that my frame rate was around 46 the whole time... dont know why? Otherwise, i'm really looking forward to your tutorial.

"Im having a tough time with smoothing groups and/or texture baking the maps (seams and hard edges)... "

Found the fix, better Normal mapping tool...