How to make grooves without editing geometry I'm trying to cut grooves onto a curved surface without directly editing the geometry.
This is my desired end result that I achieved by Ctrl+B to bevel and E to extrude down (Exactly what I don't want to do).


Is there a way I can do this with modifiers or something like that?
I will occasionally need to edit the fine details of the mesh and I can't do it whilst these grooves are physically preset, and I need them there for reference. I also can't bake a normal map for it because the materials are geometry defined and my change too.
Thanks in advance.
You can add a groove using a boolean modifier.

My process would be as follows:

Duplicate some faces from your original, then separate them into another object.



Scale them down, and extrude out some thickness to get the inverse of the groove you want:



Add a boolean modifier on the first object set to difference, and select the new object as the target:



Then, just hide the second object to see the groove: