Fake Grooves would be a HUGE feature: Imagine VrayClipper in Mesh mode that could create fake grooves in the intersections with thin geometry (in attached image the vertical plane creates fake groove on the sphere). More complex Grooves also could be ruled by splines on surfaces. And of course it’d be nice to have gap width and round corner radius settings.
Or, instead of VrayClipper it could be improved VrayDistance map in a special “Groove mode”. In attached video you can see fake grooves already implemented in Substance Painter.
Interesting. It is actually possible now using a distance tex piped into a color2bump. It can also work similarly on a surface. I did this with a curve dran on the surface with an offset, then using face snapping in order to edit the shape.
I guess Substance is using a similar general approach but just maybe a bit more immediate to draw with.
To be honest I just assumed it might work, so tested it and it did. I see what you mean about the further filleted edges but not sure if that’s doable. I’ll have a look…maybe there’s a method where two bumps could be used, as the Substance approach has to be grounded in some sort of trickery like that 
I guess Substance is using a similar general approach but just maybe a bit more immediate to draw with.
It looks like Painter interactively projects a groove normal map along the path
Hehe yeah I didn’t think about that but it’s obvious when you see it in action.
damn this it trippy :
https://x.com/cmzw_/status/2082071045113299155
a plane with a round hole punched through it. The entire scene is two objects, 8 vertices, 2 faces. There is no hole. It’s drawn by a material on a flat quad.
The node group is the infinite cylinder from iq’s ray-surface intersection functions. iq is Inigo Quilez, and the reference is his Intersectors page – a library of exact formulas for where a ray hits a given primitive. So instead of stepping through the surface in small increments like parallax occlusion does, the shader solves the ray-cylinder intersection analytically and shades the quad as if a tunnel ran straight through it. Same math shader people have been using in raytracers for decades, just wired up in Blender’s shader nodes.
Running this in the Blender 5.2.0 viewport on geometry this small costs basically nothing