Parallax / heightmap encoding

I think a lot of people are using Substance for that, so maybe you can have a look in this direction?

It can help too: Height map creation (see replies in this thread)

Also, to be sure, what you could try to do is to use Spector to analyze a frame rendered by Unity which is using parallax mapping, and see what is the height map texture that is send to the shader / the shader code itself.