Hey, I'm writing a mod that's primarily focused on adding some building materials. One such material is a framed daub (example reference image, and an example of some WIP blocks). Basically, strips of wood running in different directions on the block. There are a couple different possibilities: centered vertical board, centered horizontal board, edge boards, diagonal boards, and corner pieces. There are enough combinations there that making separate textures is completely impractical. So instead having a texture for every combination, I'd like to have one base texture, and then one texture with transparency for each frame type. That means I'd only need 13 textures. This leads me to two questions.
1) How can I render a finished texture? I would need to apply the base block texture, and then any applicable frame textures on the same face to build up the desired combination. Does anyone have an example of how such a renderer would work? I'm very inexperienced with rendering.
2) What would be the most efficient way to store that data? There are too many combinations to store the information as metadata (especially since these blocks are going to be sided, with framing only on one axis). The only alternative to my knowledge would be a tile entity. Now, a tile entity would be nice, since it would be trivial to not only store the data, but also store framing data individually for every side of the block. However, I've got reservations about using tile entities for a building material and it seems like a super shitty idea.