[http://ptex.us/index.html

](http://ptex.us/index.html)Quote
*Ptex is a texture mapping system developed by Walt Disney Animation Studios for production-quality rendering:

No UV assignment is required! Ptex applies a separate texture to each face of a subdivision or polygon mesh.

The Ptex file format can efficiently store hundreds of thousands of texture images in a single file.

Jan 15, 2010 
Ptex released as free open source.

I think, as a mostly hobbyist community, it's not much of a threat ;o).

Laurie

Attached Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxNlAlOuQQQ

It looks pretty awesome: UV-less Mipmapping! And Ptex integrated into Renderman 15. That's a no-brainer, since Disney now owns Pixar. Anyway looks really cool. Downloading and compiling now.

It does look pretty neato in a technical sense, but I imagine it will be a few years before apps catch up to it, and certainly money will have to change hands for you to eventually get it - even though this chunk of source code is free, programmer time to implement it into Poser or Max or whatever other app won't be.

There is no danger (or hope) that Poser will be influenced by the cutting edge in CG development any time soon. 

Ptex sounds like a godsend, but I don't think my software supports  it. The format is recognized by Renderman, but that requires Maya--or the in-house Pixar stuff we don't get to play with. 

It actually looks like someone took a cue or two from the poly paint features of Zbrush and from the old "viewpaint" methods that ILM used to use to paint over intricate Nurbs models that had a large number of stitched nurbs surfaces. It's definitely "the future" for CG in general, i would think, but I don't see it replacing good old fashioned uv based texture painting anytime soon. Definitely not in game dev for a while which means probably not for another 15-20 years in Poser-time. :p -Les

This looks very exciting!

"The format is recognized by Renderman, but that requires Maya--or the in-house Pixar stuff we don't get to play with." 

As far as I can tell, Renderman isn't native to Maya, it requires a plugin. One such plugin is 3Delight for Maya. 3delight is of course, the render engine for Daz Studio. DS, (at least in the standard version not sure about advanced), doesn't surface all the functionality of 3delight but there is a plugin which supposedly does. From a strictly technical standpoint, it seems that it would probably be easier to implement in DS than in Poser. Unless it offers substantial advantages with a low learning curve I wouldn't expect to see it anytime soon though :-)

Maya is 'Renderman compliant.' 3dsMax and the others aren't at this time. Maya users can purchase the Renderman plugin for about a thousand dollars. It's supposed to render pretty fast  compared to Mental Ray. I wonder if it would be quick enough to make quality desktop animation feasible, but that's another topic for another board. 

Quote - Maya users can purchase the Renderman plugin for about a thousand dollars. It's supposed to render pretty fast  compared to Mental Ray. I wonder if it would be quick enough to make quality desktop animation feasible, but that's another topic for another board.

MAX, XSI etc have 3delight though which is just as good as Pixar's version, perhaps even better in some areas. Renderman just refers to the architecture under which they all run. As for speed, if you're using displacement, subds, motion blur and DoF, it's way way faster then mentalray or any raytracer. But if you're using GI, raytraced shadows, reflections, refractions etc then it's way way slower. OTOH raytracing is getting a major boost this year with a bunch of GPU renderers (like with Octane) so who knows what the future is gonna be like.

Anyways back on topic, like sixus1 said, this is very similar to the NURBS texturing approach that's doable in many apps, just extended to poly meshes. Essentially it works by treating each poly as an independant NURBS patch. Because of this implementing it isn't very hard... you'd just write a shader that, instead of using stored UV coords, calculates them on the fly for each face and then uses the ptex library to read the appropriate texture. Harder would be to do the same for your fav. 3D painter, only in reverse. Which is also part of the reason this isn't as popular as it could be, cause to use it you need a 3D painter. 2D image editors wont work.

As for poser, since Firefly is also renderman, it would be relatively easier to do this sort of thing in it, if it actually allowed custom shaders of course. But since it doesn't, and no one at SM seems the least bit interested in providing the functionality, it will remain a pipe dream.

"MAX, XSI etc have 3delight though..."  

Also support for 3delight or prman in Rhino through RhinoMan and C4D with the Cineman module. You can get a free version of 3delight and see if the Ptex examples will render using it.

Maya is Renderman compliant.

Not really. To say that something is Renderman  compliant, it should support several if not most of the features as outlined in RI spec. Out of the box, Maya doesn't / isn't. Curiously Poser is closer to the RI spec. It's just that over the years, the integration between Maya and PRman has grown, while Max and XSI are no longer supported.

...it's supposed to render pretty fast...

As mentioned, raytraced effects are Renderman For Maya's forte. But displacements are free (negligible impact on render time) and the motion blur is super duper fast and much cleaner than mental ray's. But to really make use of the speed gains (a) you might want to wait until the next version, which will support unlimited number of processors and (b) you must consider catering to the renderer every step of the way:

• keeping poly weight low either using NURBS or subDs. Calculating SSS on a Mil3 or later character will choke your system for hours.

• keep all textures square and convert to mipmaps

• limit raytracing as much as possibly by using reflection maps  and selecting only certain items to participate in raytraced reflections; and "deep shadows" which are semi-transparent depth mapped shadows

• pre-processing and caching ambient occlusion and SSS. The caustic IMHO aren't very good.

• pre-compiling shaders to avoid conversion during the scene translation. Renderman Pro Studio does this semi-automatically.

Is it worth all the extra work? Yes. It's pretty fast, the motion blur is stunning. Learning curve is steep.

 Has anyone had success compiling this yet?

so it's intended for animating lo-res figures and not for NVITWS still renders?
quads-only.  one of the power-point slides actually asked if they had 3-sided polys,
should they subdivide it with quads or hexagns?  like squaring the triangle.

Compiling it wont do you any good, as the source they've provided is just the raw classes for working with ptex files. You'll have to link to it from your shader/tool and use the classes there for it to do anything. Incidently 3delight doesn't seem to recognize the file format so that sucks. I guess they haven't got around to supporting it yet (if at all)

Quote - so it's intended for animating lo-res figures and not for NVITWS still renders?
quads-only.  one of the power-point slides actually asked if they had 3-sided polys,
should they subdivide it with quads or hexagns?  like squaring the triangle.

Seems to be that way, yes. Though frankly for stills you don't really need something like renderman in the first place. Most of the benefits of that tech lie in animation.

 i hope we benefit from the new tech. It would surely help those of us who have the disorder called uvmapinsanity.