@jdellinger98 Glad you're making progress! There's a number of ways to approach the texture baking on this. Again it's a case of what makes sense for the project. How you set this up is something you'll have to determine based on your software pipeline and how you want to texture it. There's been a lot of good advice in…
@jdellinger98 Both Eric and Ghogiel have provided solid recommendations on modeling and background information on baking. Here's an example of a high-poly mesh with sloped edges and without. Filling the holes isn't entirely necessary but there are certain situations where it makes baking easier and it can provide a softer…
For a strip of flat plane that you want to bake some detail to, try this sort of cage set up. Cage right at the top of the sandwich and low poly at the bottom. For the alpha, you could just use vert color or mat IDs to get the black and white. In that example sandwich I made a plane and stuck under the high poly geo, make…