Is there any third party tool to enable PTEX for Mental Ray?

[faizol]

Hi all,

Aside from using something like 3D-Coat to convert PTEX to regular uvs, is there any other tool that directly read ptex texture for Mental Ray in the market? Renderman has native support for PTEX. 3Delight supports PTEX to some extend, and the same with V-Ray. Don't know about Arnold, but for Mental Ray to still not support PTEX natively after so many years, I just don't know what to say.

[Maximus]

I dont have that much knowledge here, but as far as i know its not softimage problem, its mental ray itself that doesnt support ptex.
I might be wrong.

[faizol]

I dont have that much knowledge here, but as far as i know its not softimage problem, its mental ray itself that doesnt support ptex.
I might be wrong.

yes I know, that's why I didn't mention Softimage at all. I was hoping before that Mental Images would provide ptex support in their latest Mental Ray bundled with the new Autodesk proxducts, especially since ptex is widely used by big studios.

[Hirazi Blue]

There was an experimental "workaround" shader for Maya.
I couldn't get it to work in Softimage, but that's quite probably just me.
The shader is introduced in this CGTalk thread

[faizol]

There was an experimental "workaround" shader for Maya.
I couldn't get it to work in Softimage, but that's quite probably just me.
The shader is introduced in this CGTalk thread

Thanks. I'll check it out.

[Nolan]

From the mentalimages forum
http://forum.mentalimages.com/showthread.php?9315-Mental-Ray-and-PTex

>Remydrh
>It's been announced in the comments for 2013 products that PTex is supported.
>http://elementalray.wordpress.com/

I haven't seen that comment myself yet.

Its not at these pages:
http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/cory/announcing_maya_2013
http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/ken/3ds_max_2013_announced

Anyone know where the comment is?

[Nolan]

Found it on the "View all comments" on the Maya blog, page 2
http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/cory/announcing_maya_2013/comments?pg=2&
>Posted by mogkc on Mar 28, 2012 at 02:45 AM
>re: Ptex in mental ray
>
>This is supported in 3.10 so you can use it in Maya. I'll be upfront with you and say the workflow is a bit rougher
>than we would like.

Hope its surfaced in XSI.

[Maximus]

from here http://forum.mentalimages.com/showthrea ... #post37869

Ptex support has been added October 2010 to mental ray. Core support for ptex face and barycentric face information has been added in mental ray 3.10. The actual lookup is done
by a shader mib_ptex_lookup, declaration given below.
We have added support for all subdivision face types, i.e. triangles, quads, pentagons etc.
Using the shader is actually quite simple, here is an example:

material "mtl" "mib_ptex_lookup"(
"filename" "triangle.ptx")
end material

Gunter

# ptex lookup shader
#
# filename: .ptx file
#
# width: scale factor for filter width
# blur: blur amount to add to filter width [0..1]
#
# filter_type:
# 0 point Point-sampled (no filtering)
# 1 bilinear Bi-linear interpolation
# 2 box Box filter
# 3 gaussian Gaussian filter
# 4 bicubic General bi-cubic filter (uses sharpness option)
# 5 bspline BSpline (equivalent to bi-cubic w/ sharpness=0)
# 6 catmullrom Catmull-Rom (equivalent to bi-cubic w/ sharpness=1)
# 7 mitchell Mitchell (equivalent to bi-cubic w/ sharpness=2/3)
#
# interpolate_level: Interpolate between mipmap levels
# filter_sharpness: for general bi-cubic filter only

declare shader color "mib_ptex_lookup" (
string "filename",
scalar "width" default 1.0,
scalar "blur" default 0.0,
integer "filtertype" default 4,
boolean "interpolate_level" default off,
scalar "filter_sharpness" default 1.0)
version 1
end declare


Not sure if its gonna be present in SI 2013, but i wouldnt hold my breath.

[Kzin]

the shader declaretion should make it work in xsi i think, so everyone can try it as soon as 2013 is available.

[Kzin]

ok, some clarification from david:
the ptex shader need its own dll, so for xsi you would also need an extra spdl if the shader is not integrated in 2013.

[Maximus]

guess what, it appears to not be integrated, at least i didnt find anything on online docs.