Reply To: What’s the benefit of working in this particular way?

Thanks for raising so many good points @numbernine  🙂 

To me the main benefits of this method are that it leaves the target mesh completely intact and allow you to treat the decal as a separated object. This means you can apply decals during any stage of your project, whether you are at the early stage or polishing it, with clean visual result. This technique also provides better looking results in non-flat surfaces compared to using the shrinkrap modifier.

Shrinkwraping the decal  on a curved surface or on the inside of an L shape will end up with non aligned faces no matter how high you’ll subdivide it. This will force you to use a higher offset value to avoid intersection and overlapping faces compared to the very low value of the displacement modifier. The end result can be damaged.

Booling will allow you to borrow the target mesh and the decal will share the exact same topology and you will not have this issue. With a one-to-one topology you get the exact same normals and shading as well, which will make the decal to look stuck on the target.

In the case of multiple targets, joining them would be quite destructive if you’re at an early stage. Arguably you can as well  duplicate them and use them as a target and then you’d be using a similar approach to this workflow 🙂

The main drawback I found with using the UV Project technique directly on the target is that it goes through the whole mesh if (I used an image as empty for better visibility):

At the end of the day it of course also is a matter of preference, simply I find this workflow more convenient for the reasons described above. It can also be then scripted it so you can just select the target, the imported decal and you get the job done for you 🙂

Thanks again for these very good questions,I hope you’ll find this useful eventually 🙂
Let me know if things remain unclear:)

/Thibaut