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Haven’t heard much of PTex in a while since the original announcement, but it was a hot topic at SIGGRAPH this year.  If you’re note familiar with it, then read the original paper which discussed a new UV Texture Mapping technique which is fully automatic on arbitrary complexity and size models.

At SIGGRAPH, products like 3D-Coat and Houdini were showcasing PTex integration, and eventually Autodesk demoed a version of MudBox with PTex support.   The Foundry’s Mari 1.0 has some limited PTex integration, and with the open-source nature of the algorithm it’s guaranteed to be coming to other systems as well.

Hopefully, PTex will come to MudBox soon and then to 3dsMax and Maya shortly afterward.

PTex 3D texturing becomes a reality at SIGGRAPH.

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Walt Disney Animation Studios has taken a page from Sony Pictures Imageworks and launched a website dedicated to technical publications and open-source software they use in production of their own films. Currently hosting information regarding PTex, it also offers several technical papers on ray-tracing, 2D/3D conversions (Beauty and the Beast), and several other topics.

Walt Disney Animation Studios (WDAS) launched an open technology site http://www.disneyanimation.com/technology where users will, for the first time, be able to access innovative technologies developed in house.  The first software available is WDAS’s revolutionary texture mapping system, Ptex, which was made available on January 15th 2010 at http://ptex.us/. Ptex was developed by WDAS Principal Software Engineer Brent Burley for use in production quality rendering, and is being driven to become adopted widely in the community by WDAS Director of Technology Dan Candela. WDAS has also compiled a set of papers available on the site for sharing additional technical innovations that will benefit the industry.

Hit the site to browse their offerings, and read the full press release after the break.

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Disney has just release previously discussed PTex under an open-source (BSD) license and made it publicly available to all.

The new open source library supports Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces (including quad and non-quad faces), Loop subdivision surfaces and polymeshes (either all-quad or all-triangle). Also, several data types are supported including 8 or 16-bit integer, float, and half-precision float. An arbitrary number of channels can be stored in a Ptex file. Arbitrary meta data can be stored in the Ptex file and accessed through the memory-managed cache.

The source code is available in a github repository, and you can watch a demonstration of PTex in use after the break.

Ptex Overview. via CGSociety

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A new library from the University of Utah and Disney discusses a new UV texture mapping library called ‘PTex’ which can map UV coordinates to models on a fully automatic basis with for models or arbitrary complexity and size.

We propose a new texture mapping method for Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces that requires no explicit parameterization. Our method, Ptex, stores a separate texture per quad face of the subdivision control mesh, along with a novel per-face adjacency map, in a single texture file per surface. Ptex uses the adjacency data to perform seamless anisotropic filtering of multi-resolution textures across surfaces of arbitrary topology. Just as importantly, Ptex requires no manual setup and scales to models of arbitrary mesh complexity and texture detail.

Ptex is now supported in Pixar’s Renderman, and was used in Bolt & “Glago’s Guest”, and an open-source version of the library is coming son.  Videos, slides, and the PDF paper are available on their site.

via Ptex: Per-Face Texture Mapping for Production Rendering.

Graphics, Science disney, library, ptex, texture