Difficulty...

Getting a texture that will actually work with a vertical surface is rather difficult, and making one probably even more so. The search is on for PhotoShop Brushes that would create a similar effect, but images such as the one above are next to useless and the one below is too difficult to alpha channel. In a large disappointment, a perfect mesh was found mentioned in a developer forum... only to have a broken resource link. Fun times indeed.

So far, this is the best result achieved with just under 2,000 polygons, but it can only be viewed from a very limited angle, otherwise the planar array becomes obvious.