Geo VS Alpha

bcottage

Bit of a dilemma ahead of me...

As you can see this piece i am currently modeling is going to be poly expensive. I see these choices ahead of me:

(bare in mind this is part of a modular building and i have enough map space for a standard black repeating texture and text.)

If i should bake this onto a plane i would have to have an extra 4 maps (diffuse,normal,spec,alpha)

1. plane with alpha map
2. Thickness
3. flat with no alpha





p.s. This will be going into udk

WarrenM

It will look nicer and light better as geometry. Expensive, sure, but if you aren't repeating it a dozen times throughout the environment, I say spend the polygons and make it nice because it's a pretty cool sign.

Michael Knubben

I see quite a few repeating elements in the curls, how about putting baking one and mapping it to a few planes (cut down to size a little bit so as to reduce overlapping)?
You'll still need to use a normalmap (your atlas is diffuse only, then?), but you'll be able to keep it much smaller.