What I have been investigating is a way to give some thickness to this. From the right distance this technique works well but get too close and you can see the mesh has no thickness. What I was experimenting with was using a displacement map + transparency map to try and give the wire cage some thickness.

I could not get the transparency to work in conjunction with displacement but I could generate the displaced geometry and then just delete the faces for the holes. This of course will produce large poly counts but for this mesh I was getting just over 1k polys displaced which appears to be lower then the modeled version and is of course much faster and easier to create a variety of grate patterns.

Below is the shader network. The repeatable file texture is plugged in the lamberts transparency. You can also use a blinn but remember you must also plug the transparency map into the spec.

The place2dtexture node of the lambert controls the u and v repeat of the image as well as rotation.

The color balance of the file node - remember to check lumanence is alpha or you will get no transparency when rendering in mental ray. This drove me crazy when I was first playing with transparency maps.