UVs are not needed any more since a long time. They have many drawbacks (the first one being that they are explicit).
The renderers I used in production, when I left the VFX industry ca. 2010, all supported PTEX [http://ptex.us/ptexpaper.html].
Blender seems to have WIP support for it too nowadays [ https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Nicholasbishop/Ptex]