Yes usually I would agree with you, however there is a good reason for the lack of bump mapping. The ground and the background grass and sky, are seperate to the snails. The image is a composite, using Matt/Shadow material to cast the shadows.

If I had bump mapped the ground texture, I would have needed to exactly match that bumping for the Matt/Shadow. Again usually not a problem, however in this sequence I have moved the background along, creating the rolling backdrop, so that I can animate the snails, lip synch and so forth, without having to repeatidly render the backdrop, which is pretty memory intensive, taking 1 min a frame to render at best.

Once the animation is composited, I will be overlaying a final 'foreground' layer, with appropriate depth of field settings to wrap up the scene. This should include some additional details to further mask the floor....

I realise you didn't ask me to explain Y.... and I have just rattled on

Thanks for the feedback