Well I have two approaches for this week. The top by hand or the bottom procedural
If I do the top and I can keep the tiled effect then I can totally get that working in a great way.
If I do the bottom I am probably going to have to bake the effect onto the base mesh completely unwrapped in a slightly clever way. That should keep performance up just fine.
I could always just do this on the shader route and bypass the geometry altogether as a third option (I know the procedural workflow well enough to mimic it in the node editor I think?