Create/simulate repeating bevel on walls of room geometry

Question

I'm super new to using blender, and i'm enjoying the experience thus far! I'm looking to create a very simple room that has a sort of beveled texture/geometry along its walls, floor, ceiling, etc. My current method of going about this is... inefficient. Thus i'm looking for better ways to achieve the same result, and i'm willing to accept a variety of options.

My first idea was to utilize normal maps in my material to give single large-scaled cubes the illusion of beveled walls, which would probably be the most efficient option, but the only useful source i found was for using an outdated version of blender. My second idea was to try to learn instancing or array modifiers to somehow achieve this, but i wasn't sure if this was the best, or most very efficient, way to construct entire rooms. My last idea was to somehow utilize the bevel modifier to somehow make it repeat along a single cube to make it looks like there are several cubes, but i don't even know if this is possible.

For reference, here's sort of what i'm looking to achieve. i made this using multiple separate cube meshes all with the bevel modifier:

Answer 1

Nah, don't use the bevel modifier or array or anything, no need for real geometry (unless you need it)

There are two approaches: One Procedural, One through PBR Materials.

Procedural Material

For your specific square tiles texture, refer to the below material setup I made:

Though remember to unwrap your mesh, by going to Edit Mode press A to select all and press U > Cube Projection to automatically get your UVs, or you can place seams. Though note that it's not necessary to add a Texture Coordinate or Mapping Node (Automatically done by pressing Ctrl + T if you have the node wrangles addon) if your generated procedural textures give you the right result. Try playing around with settings like the scale.

PBR Material

You can just take some tile PBR textures from websites like Ambient CG, where we can get CC0 textures for free. For example, try this texture, or this one. Note that you will have to UV Unwrap your object to get good results from them. You can also change the colours by adding a MixRGB or Hue/Saturation node between the colour input and in the Hue/Saturation Node, decrease the saturation and increase the brightness to get a white colour.