Guild of Writers

Disney’s Ptex Released as FREE Open Source.

http://www.blendernation.com/disneys-ptex-released-as-free-open-source/
http://ptex.us/
http://www.disneyanimation.com/library/ptex/ptex-slides.pdf

This might be an interesting tool for agewriters.
However it is not a working program but the source code of an api.
So its not usable in this stage but integrating in Blender 2.5 seems possible.

May be, the "savies" can look to it, to see whether or not this is something to keep in mind.

What does it do?
I listened to the video in the first link and had no idea what the guy was talking about.
He seemed intent on drawing black lines with a comb on a yellow-and-pink tyrannosaur, for some reason.

This is how I did understand it.

It has some similarity with Z-brush.
A low poly object, can be cranked up to highres by subsurf.
Instead off UV mapping you can select in the Hires mesh the part you want to texture , it will be flattened out automatically if disired after selection.
Paint this flattened part and see the result in real time projected on the high poly mesh.
(Normally when you want to UV map a complex mesh, you have to carefully select the faces from the correct view point.
Usually from more then 1 view point! and you also have to use seams .)
Not with Ptex!
When finished painting, the high-poly textured part will be applied automatically on the lowpoly faces and displace/stretch the highres textures to the right proportions.
So you don't have to build a low and a high resolution object to achieve this. In the endresult the lowpoly object looks similar as the high-poly.


On the other hand when using this technic you can only do this from within your 3D application, as Blender is.
You cannot use for instance Photoshop or the Gimp to make and bake your textures at the same time.
Every advantage has its disadvantage

dendwaler wrote:On the other hand when using this technic you can only do this from within your 3D application, as Blender is.
You cannot use for instance Photoshop or the Gimp to make and bake your textures at the same time.
Every advantage has its disadvantage

This is the real beauty of it though. It would be fantastic to have this ability in Blender. Especially if it works as well as in the videos.

Blender already has multi-resolution meshes and Z brushes to manipulate meshes.

Of course, you're not likely to know that if you don't know a good deal about blender's feature set already. <_<

What you're looking for is the "multires" modifier, which actually has it's own panel in the buttons view. Just click the big "add multires" button in the "multires" panel, and add levels (by pressing the add level button) to increase the subdivision. you can then edit the mesh in any level of subdivision and view it at other levels by changing the level.

The z-brush style editing is known as "sculpt mode" and is an alternative to edit mode in the mode list. <_<

Ahh, I remember reading about this now. There's a tutorial out there for multires texturing, but it requires baking. The results shown were impressive, but I wasn't sure whether it would work with URU - since it made bump-maps. I've been through so much information that my brain is starting to leak.

I thought I read somewhere around here that we could use Alpha texturing for depth, but not bump-maps. Is this incorrect?