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.