Recreating indentation from a staple in soft material

[indigoGnat]

I'm looking to recreate the indentation caused by stapling into a soft material. I'd like to accomplish this in a non-destructive way (with a deformer, rather than subdividing and editing the actual surface polygons themselves)

In the past I've subdivided the surface and edited the points manually, beveling the edges of the indentation around the staple. But it's not a quick process. And since there are usually 50+ staples on a sheet it's not efficient to do each one manually.

I'm open to any sort of suggestions. I'm willing to buy a plugin for this if I have to.

Here is an image showing what I'm looking to accomplish.

[ed_mciver]

You can use a collision deformer with a Octane ObjectTag Sub-division applied to your base object (Deformers in Cinema need polygons to work so you might find yourself needing to add more to your model to get the required look, which you have said you don't want to do, using a Sub-division should fix this).

Another way would be to use a depth map in the Octane displacement channel of your fabric texture. You can create one using Photoshop or buy a copy of Substance Painter or Quixel Suite.

Cheers

Ed