headus 3D tools

[SLI_Fallen]

Phil, I surely do not mean to "stir the pot" on UV rendering methods that may "compete" with your own efforts, but I am curious if you have heard of PTEX, the (explicity) UV-less texturing method created by Disney Animation Studios and what you think about it.

It is open source, (free) and maybe there are aspects of it that may fit with your plans perhaps. If nothing else, I often like to look to others work for inspiration, and other methods on how to do things.

Some modeling packages have already adopted it (and i'm reading that the soon to be released Zbrush4 might (soon) as well, (mudbox already does) which is good news for me since my upgrade will be free!

Main site: http://ptex.us/

Disney's Technical info on ptex with videos and pdf's: http://www.disneyanimation.com/library/ptex/

[headus]

"curious if you have heard of PTEX"

I had heard the name, but hadn't looked into the details before. It looks like its getting pretty good acceptance as an alternate!

Just off the top of my head, talking from total ignorance of the finer details of the implementation, but having everything in one file may not suit some people. Some hero characters these days are made up of hundreds of 2k or 4k tiled maps; stuffing all of that into one single file would cause some problems I'd think. Maybe a hybrid system could work there, some way to have multiple ptex files with the adjacency blending info saved not only for quads within the file, but also between files.

I guess from UVLayout's point of view, there's going to be a need for UVs for a while still with real-time rending applications (e.g. games), so I wont go and shoot myself just yet :)

Phil

[SLI_Fallen]

That pdf file has some good info on the progression of UV's and tiling.
http://www.disneyanimation.com/library/ptex/ptex.pdf

And there is one very important distinction I think with regard to the file sizes. This may bode well for ray-traced Production movies..but (at least yet) it may not have a place in real time rendering (AKA=Games). Not to say you cant use a ptex CREATED texture model and bake it into a "standard" texture (this is available on 3D-coats implementation apparently. Not sure about Mudbox but I would assume so. Just thought it was very interesting and right up your alley "genera-wise"

[r_knightly]

I cant see this taking over until 3D painting apps can do a better job than photoshop.

I was reading that Weta textures for Avatar were comming out at 10's of gigabytes per channel... I cant wait to get my hands on Mari

SLI_Fallen the 3DCoat implementation exports to a texture atlas of single faces. Its useless for realtime models The vertex count goes through the roof using UV's like that.

[SLI_Fallen]

Indeed R_Knightly. And were still waiting for real-time ray tracing too. I think that is around the corner (intel's made some recent strides) but were not there just yet. What I did find interesting about some of that info was how far the UV mapping methods themselves have come in the past 5-8 years or so. I know, an ETERNITY in computer time,but still...