I’m an architecture student with a very specific question. I’m trying to emulate the look of this space seen in the first image. The walls are made from metal grating. As you can see the effect is quite different close up to at a distance.
My first attempt was to actually model the metal as follows:
However that many mesh faces absolutely torched my frame rate, so I tried creating a substance to do it. It looked okay in the front view but when you look to the side it really doesn’t have the same effect.
The effect you’re seeing in the real world and when using actual geometry is because the metal has thickness that the flat texture does not. You can fake it with parallax occlusion / relief mapping techniques, of which Unity’s standard shader has a simple version of when you supply a height map, but it’s not accurate enough to work for your case.
This asset may have an accurate enough implemenation of parallax occlusion to work for this specific case:
You can get offset for the “sides” of the mesh by dotting normals and viewDir just like you’d do for rimlight. Cost is low, you can do it all in one pass. You see it a lot on railings and stuff like this.
