Did the new Bmesh system scupper the development of Ptex? I remember seeing clips like the one below and thinking how useful this would be…
I don’t know if that’s true, but I think Ptex is done.
Thing is, neither Cycles or BI supports it. 
It worked but meant no vertex paint mode. Needed to have a proper integration .
Whilst bi and cycles don’t support it other 3rd party renderers do and they have blender scripts.
Sad but inevitable that whilst the cg community is increasingly releasing libs in open source blender is often last to the table in getting them in due to lack of resource .
Sigh… We need to figure out a way of getting a more consistent development fund so these features can be added at a better pace. Plus, it would be good to be able to keep developers working on Blender, rather than them being hired away by competing software…
The Developer of Ptex for blender is still active with blender development. He is not taken away.
Just that he isn’t working on Ptex, but Dynamic topology instead.
That’s good to hear, especially if he’s working on dynamic topology, looks exciting. Still would be good to get more money to devs though. I guess it would be down to Brecht to implement it in Cycles?
^It would be cool if we could save the painted things as an image (if we uv-unwrapted it) so we can use them in cycles and BI.
The whole point of PTex is that you don’t have to unwrap your mesh, everything is calculated automatically and more detail can be added on the fly to individual patches or faces.
With no unwrapping, I suppose PTex and Open Subdiv kind of go hand in hand (makes sense with them both coming from Pixar). Would be an amazing combination for Blender to have
GiteZz, we can already do that with texture painting, check out this tutorial from Blendercookie: http://cgcookie.com/blender/2011/04/11/texture-painting-in-glsl-shading-mode/
Ptex no Seams. 
Nicholas Bishop’s “Vpaint” has textures overlay(that has nothing to do with Ptex)
that would be welcome with what we have now, IMHO…
as well as the realtime texture symmetry…
(the texture overlay “stencil”, like used in MudBox, 3d-Coat etc would be really nice, even if used on UV’s first,
or Ptex then baked to UV’s if that is how it has to be done… but that would add an extra step)
Vpaint has been waiting on the vine so long…
just would like to see some of the features added, even on the regular UV level.
PTex comes form Disney not Pixar (pixar belongs to disney but ptex is form disney animation studios not disney pixar animation studios)
I knew someone would bring me up on that :eyebrowlift2:
Just had a look at Vpaint
Looks like we have to clone Nicholas Bishop a couple of times to get all these cool features up and running
So we’re coming up on GSOC 2013 and we still have nothing to show from GSOC 2010? Sad. 
That’s not true, most things from GSOC2010 wound up in Blender. Ptex was never part of any GSOC, it was a side project of a developer who also happened to take part in GSOCs.
Would be nice to setup a fund raising for Nicholas to bring him back to Ptex, if he would be actually interested. With recent paint refactoring and further polishing the paint system could really shine.
The reason nicholas ditched ptex was because it is not supported in either Blender Internal or cycles. He has claimed he would resume work if support was included in the render engines.
According to this page it was started as part of GSOC 2010.
The reason nicholas ditched ptex was because it is not supported in either Blender Internal or cycles. He has claimed he would resume work if support was included in the render engines.
Hmm. I’m no programmer but don’t renderers just map the texture to the polygons based on the UV layout? I thought ptex just skipped the UV step.
He did Ptex during GSoC, but it wasn’t part of his original proposal. Sculpt masking and multires vertex paint were the targets - but on a whim he decided to add Ptex also.
I don’t think anything from his GSoC project that year got merged. This blog postby him indicates he wasn’t happy with the mask code, which he obviously has rewritten since; assumptions could be made about the rest being the same.
This other blog post by him gives some insight about why some things do and do not get merged.