DISNEY ANIMATION
DISNEY ANIMATION CAREERS
Ptex is a texture mapping system developed by Walt Disney Animation Studios for production-quality rendering:
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.
There were many drawbacks to traditional texture mapping methods that led to the development of Ptex:
UV assignment was a tedious task, and making good UVs on complex models was difficult.
Texture seams could produce visible artifacts especially with displacement maps.
Large numbers of texture files were required creating a significant I/O bottleneck.
Ptex addresses all these issues by eliminating UV assignment, providing seamless filtering, and allowing any number of textures to be stored in a single file.
Ptex has been used on virtually every surface of every Walt Disney Animation Studios production since 2008.
Supports Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces (including quad and non-quad faces), Loop subdivision surfaces, and polymeshes (either all-quad or all-triangle).
Several data types are supported including 8 or 16-bit integer, float, and half-precision float.
An arbitrary number of channels can be stored in a Ptex file.
Arbitrary metadata can be stored in the Ptex file and accessed through the memory-managed cache.
Ptex uses a custom file format that is designed specifically for efficient rendering. A Ptex file can store an arbitrary number of textures along with mipmaps and adjacency data used for filtering across face boundaries.
Ptex File Format Specification
Adjacency data
Triangle textures
Standard meta data keys
See the paper, Ptex: Per-Face Texture Mapping for Production Rendering, Brent Burley and Dylan Lacewell, Eurographics Symposium on Rendering 2008.
View the slides from the Eurographics presentation as Powerpoint or pdf.
Watch a demonstration of the Ptex painting workflow.