Disney releases Ptex as open source. Ptex is the texture mapping system developed by Walt Disney Animation Studios for production-quality rendering. Ptex workflow requires no UV assignment, 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, while 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.
The ptex workflow is quite extraordinary, where textures are based on polygons rather than UVs and the parameterization of the texels are arbitrary, as shown in the video below. Quite exciting!
From the press release: “We are happy to announce that the Disney Ptex library has been released as open source under the BSD license. The Ptex library is the same production-proven code used at Disney and included with Pixar’s PRMan, and includes full support for reading, writing, caching, and filtering Ptex texture files.
The Ptex home page is located at http://ptex.us, and the source code
is hosted at http://github.com/wdas/ptex/.
We have set up a discussion group at http://groups.google.com/group/ptex along with a related http://groups.google.com/group/ptex-announce group. We encourage your comments and questions. We expect to follow Ptex with other open source projects that we hope the community will find beneficial. We will soon be launching a new Walt Disney Animation Studios Technology page under http://disneyanimation.com. It will include links to our open source projects as will as a library of recent publications. An additional announcement will be sent when the Technology site goes live. All further announcements will be made to the ptexannounce group.
Thanks for your interest!
Brent Burley
Walt Disney Animation Studios”
