How to do cut out patterns in Maya

Basically we could make cut outs only in photoshop and then enlighten and animate them in After effects, but I would like to do so in Maya as I have more control over arranging them in a 3D composition and lighting them, also simple rigging and animating.

So there are few options:

First one is to create a texture with transparent parts achieved by alpha channels in Photoshop.

So we draw a texture (a picture), then we create alpha channels wich means that we have to colour everything that needs to be transparent with pitch black and everything that is not white (if we want partial transparency, we use greys).

Then when we create lights in Maya, we need to make sure, that they pass through the transparent parts of a plane, making it invisible. We do that with adjusting matte opacity in ...editor.

The second option is to actually model the pattern in Maya, using curves. The problem in Maya is not so much the modelling of silhouette of the cut out (using create polygon tool) as the cutting out the inside holes. This is very time consuming if we work with polygons as with them we have to actually connect all the edges and model the holes inside,

while with the curves we just project them onto the geometry and once done we can still easily remodel the hole (picture below):

The forth option is to do all these in After Effects, but the problem here is that llighting isnt so subtile and controllable3D representation isnt so acessible: