Hello!
I thought I’d just share how it worked out. I ended up going for the first option: modifying the car panel directly.
Here is the (awfully looking) geometry of the basemesh. I just extruded the outline of the emblem along its normals outside and surrounded it with a control loop.
Then I put the surrounding geometry into a vertex group:
I seperated some faces from the basemesh and created a high poly guidemesh of it. (5 sub-divisions is probably more than necessary… I guess 4 or even 3 should be fine. Haven’t checked tho) And I shrinkwraped the basemesh onto the guidemesh.
And here is the result. Very pleased with it. As smooth as one could wish for =)
EDIT: I ended up modifying the geometry slightly because it was giving me some artifacts where the triangles are really stretched. And I also added a data transfer modifier to transfer the normals from the guidemesh. Now it should be good =) (fyi: the outline of the emblem had around 65 edges where as the outline of the cutout had around 30… so it is still necessary to do some cleanup, or ideally apply another subdivision on the basemesh)
And finally here is the indentation for the front… this method worked like a charm!
