Best aproach for wall carvings/deco ?

melviso

For game engines, what is the best way to incorporate these kind of details on walls, furniture? Should this be imported as normal maps, parallax occlusion  or modelled geometry? I am not sure if this would be too expensive and affect performance and lighting issues might occur with geometry.
Here are some examples of what I am trying to achieve:


Would appreciate any advice
Thanks.

Obscura

Normally they are done with normal maps, but having them lowpoly in the geometry , having a highpoly too, and baking is a way as well. Light baking issues might appear though if you have them in the lowpoly as geometry, and the lightmap res is low, you are right. Expensive geometry is a misconception by the way, it isn't really the case anymore because of the strong hardware. For a static scene like this, you could easily use much higher poly meshes without any issue.

melviso

Thanks.. what about parallax occlusion for the wall details?

poopipe

Pom is expensive compared to geometry. 
If you're making a rocky cliff face or pebbled beach then it probably makes sense,  for something with larger simple shapes it might well be a better idea to use geometry and lod it.

The  question in this context  is do you need the silhouette?  If not you don't need pom or geometry.

 I'd suggest that for those wall panels you probably don't need the silhouette in most cases so normal maps or normal parallax mapping is probably enough 

Obscura

Parallax is the worst from all of them. If you could minimize it to the needed areas it would be ok but otherwise, probably having a 100k tris static mesh can be cheaper. Anyways, if this is just for rendering and you don't need resources for other stuff, you could go fairly high on polies without too much performance loss. Like a few hundred k for the walls. Games needs lower poly assets because they are not about rendering one room, but usually more stuff.

melviso

Thanks for the info, guys

melviso

Using normal maps. Looks okay. I am not sure if Ambient occlusion in material slot is working correctly. 

Obscura

I believe it works correctly. It shows the occlusion map in indirectly lit areas. It won't show in direct lighting, but this is how its supposed to work.

melviso

Okay. Thanks.