I like them too :rolleyes:
Hah, but why?
UV is incredibly powerful tool that allows to create a loooot of cool features.
The only reason to use PTEX is lazy artist driven approach, but come on - after you painted your sculpt in zbrush/modo/blender/mudbox you could create basic UV layout and then bake painting into this
I think the amount of graphics memory saved would be negligible, the main benefit is not having to do the UV’s, which for me I’m fine doing UV’s. Once you get into it it’s very predictable and you can kind of do it mindlessly, and it doesn’t really take all that much time.
It’s entirely possibly to do, but right now PTEX creates a texture for and aligned with each quad, no problem when you’re offline but in realtime that’s far too many unordered textures to go grab. If there were a way to make PTEX work with a GPU’s need for linear memory access and etc. then it would work great. But until someone clever comes up with a way to do that it’s not happening, not this generation anyway.
For me PTEX is the next big thing and its totally possible to do realtime rendering and it will take time to become a standard of video game industry for real time rendering and in next console (after 8 or 10 years) (movie industry already using PTEX now) we will definitely see PTEX in real time rendering and will be able to do all those things that UV does and PTEX will do it in very less time and with more high quality textures. (Again: I am not against UV’s and I don’t think PTEX developers gonna limit development of PTEX just for movie industry and in future if you can achieve the all results for game with PTEX in much less time why you would go for UV…if you can do something in 1 hour why you would spend 10 hours or days in that same process) here is the link read this carefully (industry looking forward to PTEX to render it in realtime for games and they are doing it because it is possible :
Now watch this link first : http://developer.amd.com/resources/documentation-articles/gpu-demos/amd-radeon-hd-7900-series-graphics-real-time-demos/ (after u see this ) go to next link and read carefully which is given below
http://sebastiansylvan.com/2012/06/23/casting-a-critical-eye-on-gpu-ptex/
http://developer.amd.com/resources/documentation-articles/gpu-demos/amd-radeon-hd-7900-series-graphics-real-time-demos/
http://www.neilblevins.com/cg_education/ptex_for_videocards_2015/ptex_for_videocards_2015.htm
The industry looks into many things that are possible.
Alas, some of them never see the lght of the day in the real world.
Another example of “what is possible”, but I doubt that we will ever see it “in the field”: http://www.wolfrt.de/
(The Knights-Ferry wasnt really a success, was it?)
And I think with PTEX its just the same… Nice idea. Quite possible but, at the end of the day, not really feasible.
But there are a lot of cool things you can do with UV coordinates (don’t know if something similar could be supported with PTEX) so even when (and if) PTEX gets implemented in the future I don’t believe that it can actually be a replacement for UVs anyway… I see it as a “lazy alternative” :p… which is fine! but not a replacement.
I think everyone is forgetting one thing that is pretty crucial in games: mip maps. How does PTEX technique work with mipmapping? Wouldn’t there be humongous amounts of texture bleeding if every face was its own UV island in practise? If there was padding between each face, wouldn’t it waste a lot of texture space then?