I love this pattern, what would be an efficient (procedural?) way of creating something similar?
If I understand right, you want to do this with a material rather than modeling the grooves? I think there is a way to get this. Since it doesn’t follow every surface in the same way, I think it will involve UV-maps for the parts you want for this material. Gradient texture over X axis with sine waves, scaled small (for grooves) mixed with multiply with gradient Y, linear, scaled larger (fading out of grooves). To get the curving of the material right on various surfaces you play around with the scaling and orientation in the UV map. I probably didn’t explain this too well, sorry, I think much better when I see a diagram myself.
Hey there, thanks for taking a look 
oh no no no not with material, I meant modeling the grooves, but somehow procedurally, not manually, so it has that uniformity, if that makes sense.
Ah, I think I understand. You could use the material above into the displace node in a cycles material, but this involves a certain amount of subdividing and is probably not very efficient. I’ll think about it.
Thanks dude! Much h’appreciated.
I think using booleans in arrays is going to give a better result like AlphaChannel suggests, but I’m not clever enough to get those to go around curves nicely. Since I worked on the displacement method I might as well post the file if anyone in the future finds it useful.
grooves.blend (985.3 KB)
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