Like some people above said, I would definitely not go the brick-by-brick route. Normal, parallax and displacement mapping can do all of that up close for much cheaper. Especially if this is an MMO where you could potentially have hundreds of actors on-screen (NPCs, PCs, etc), drawing that many vertices and an extra draw for each texture…it’s incredibly inefficient, honestly. You can still use the brick-by-brick method to bake out your normal maps, however.