A random idea I've been developing for a day or two: Raytraced mesh maps (AO, curvature, thickness) for texturing! Pretty performant and quite useful!

This makes texturing complex surfaces in realtime a breeze, especially when it comes to dynamic effects like rust. It only takes a second or two to calculate all of the maps, and once the modifiers are applied it all runs in realtime! Plus, works in EEVEE!

I've also added an "absorption" map along with thickness, which can be used to mimic complex subsurface scattering materials in EEVEE:

A few more stills: All EEVEE of course 😉 Models sourced from Megascans and Sketchfab, textured with shader nodes.

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I would use the hell out of this.

bravo nugeti!

Definitely would but this. Great idea and renders! 🤩

I would assume this works better the denser and more uniform the geometry is? Wondering how it'd look on messy boolean-y hard surface meshes.

Mind blowing!

This would be SO useful

This is excellent work