Picture it as being the difference between wearing a carefully-tailored suit and going naked but painting your body with fingerpaints (note: not trying to make one sound better or worse, there. It's like seeing lights pop up-in colors I wasn't even aware existed (if that makes any sense.). Still, one of my favorite things about AT is reading others geek-out in very specific fields.
The famous drool-worthy image released by Disney showed Ptex's automatic and seamless texture coordinate system in action: AdvertisementĪll I got was 'This will make things easier on people who do CG.' With Ptex, textures are parametrically stored per polygonal face and there are no visible seams. It was like someone saying “self-cleaning apartment”-everyone wanted in. Developed by Brent Burley at Disney Animation Studios, Ptex generated a ton of buzz a couple years ago with its simple promise: no more UVs and no more headaches. So you're then forced to bake your textures from a bad-UV model to a good-UV model leaving you with a mountain of cruft of old meshes, new meshes, old textures, new textures. And often you have to redo UVs at the end of sculpting because they have been stretched and compressed from the movement of polygons. Then you have the problem of seams, especially when bump and displacement maps are involved. It's not a good system because you have to manually create them, like dressing a model with a flat cloth and some scissors, so UV-mapping complex shapes is very tedious. In my 3D modeling and texturing article, I mentioned that a lot of the time involved in 3D texturing is spent dealing with UVs, the coordinate system that all 3D applications use for applying textures to models.