Thanks!

Hmm, do you mean simple bump mapping? It's fine for very subtle details, but there's no way to make it look good for prominent shapes (as far as I know).

I tweak it all the time, of course, but for this sort of pattern the quality deteriorates noticeably.

Thanks! Haven't tried the discombobulator, will check it out. Yeah, adaptive subdiv eats RAM like crazy, having some smarter tool would be awesome. Yep, that's JSplacement.

That's my own Reddit account, and yes I am the content creator.

Yes, it's cross-platform. You can download it from blender.org If you are interested, there are good tutorials for beginners on blenderguru.com

These are lattice objects to make the text fit the curved surfaces using this technique

Thanks!

You can use some tricks to make tiling effects much less noticeable (the quality is still important though). Yep, these tutorials are nice.

Thanks! The material is basically the Principled shader with the normal map from here (this one and a few more are free). For basic simulations, tutorials on YouTube help a lot, but that requires some