Archive notice: This article was originally published on July 29, 2010. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
3D textures have so far been quite a nuisance because they have to be created manually in UV mapping. The transitions between individual textures, along with the results of editing – which almost turn the structure back into a polygon layer – have remained rather laborious.
Some time ago, however, Disney and Pixar developed a system called Ptex, intended to attach textures to existing polygons and leave no visible transitions. The map of textures to be used was also easy to create: in the original Ptex demonstration, only the parameters were defined and the polygons selected. But it went no further – only after its release as open source last year was it merely a matter of time before Ptex became available in every package.
Now that Houdini 11 (which we reported on yesterday) and 3D-Coat have full Ptex functionality, The Foundry is showing “Mari” at the Nvidia stand and promising Ptex support for version 1.0. With the alpha version of Mudbox, presented yesterday by Pixar and Autodesk, also supporting Ptex, things are looking quite good so far. And once Autodesk has a function in one package, it will not be long before 3D textures are child’s play in 3ds Max and Maya too.
