Disney Open Sources Ptex

[masterfalcon]

Thought this was an interesting announcement. What does everyone think about it? Could it be useful with Ogre?

http://www.blendernation.com/disneys-pt ... en-source/

[jacmoe]

Wow - really sounds great!
No UVs - aside from rigging, UV mapping is by far the hardest skill to learn.
Just give it a texture per polygon - awesome.
Wonder how hard it would be to use this in Ogre.

[masterfalcon]

That's what I was wondering too. Their site says

The Ptex API provides cached file I/O and high-quality filtering - everything that is needed to easily add Ptex support to a production-quality renderer or texture authoring application.

. I know of a renderer

Plus, I got it to compile on OS X right out of the box. I'll actually look at the API tonight.

[Kojack]

Hmm, interesting. This looks pretty similar to a technique I thought up a while ago for light mapping. It had per face texturing with no uv unwrapping and automatic atlas generation with different texel resolutions. I didn't work on it though because I needed the shader model 4 primitive id variable and a geometry shader, and Ogre didn't support them at the time. Plus render monkey still doesn't support geometry shaders, which makes experimenting painful.
Although Ptex's "seamless anisotropic filtering of multi-resolution textures across surfaces of arbitrary topology" is way more advanced than I was going to do.


Looking through the api docs, this is really intended for software rendering. It seems you need to call Ptex::getPixel() for every pixel of every face you want to render. Looks pretty easy to add to a software raytracer or scanline renderer, but not to something like ogre.
But I could be wrong (the docs are pretty limited).