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There exists software to reproject texture normals back on to a high poly model. So this problem does have a solution for anyone interested.

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That's assuming your generator produces a normal map, the ones I've seen do not, the only texture channel they output is color. That being the one channel that a model trained on images is naturally equipped to produce.

I may be speaking out of ignorance here, but couldn't you use photogrammetry techniques to translate these to a higher resolution mesh?

Only if you have multiple images of the same areas so that you can extract actual position. And there is no guarantee that multiple pictures of the same model have the same detail, much less in a manner that can be triangulated with accuracy. A lot of the photogrammetry algorithms discard points that don't match certain error-bars.

So yes, there might be a wooden frame in the middle of that window, but does it match the math on both angles of it? Doubt it.

You can generate pretty reliable texture depth maps from just an image. It’s going to be trash if you’re trying to generate the depth for the entire 3D model but I presume it’s going to go a good job with just texture. Then you just use a displacement based on the depth map.

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