I had some free time the afternoon and, once again, found myself admiring Doom3's art. I
loaded up some assets in darkplaces as I've never experimented with anything other than diffuse layers.
I also generated some normal maps for my 2D pixel art using nvidia's texture tools for photoshop. The results were pretty bad, though I didn't have high expectations. Using higher rez assets yielded some pretty good results but the art was of organic stuff (stone, wood, etc) and the plasticy look of the normal maps is pretty lame. It really takes a bit of fiddling to get it to look good.
On that note, it occurs to me that the design of Doom3 is perfect for showing off the tech it used. It seems all these nifty shaders and texture maps work best with hard surfaces and dramatic lighting. Doom3 texture set is really easy to map with as well. That's some good designing!