We introduce a method to pack Ptex per-face texture data that is both space-efficient and hardware-friendly. Recently presented real-time implementations of Ptex have been wasteful with space and required a storage cost many times higher than the size of the original texture data. Our method packs multiple levels of Ptex data together, and requires only around 8% increase in storage for our test textures. Additionally, because of efficient data packing, our method wastes less space than a typical texture atlas, which requires buffer regions to be added between the separate charts within the texture.

Only 63% of the texels in the texture atlas contain actual color data, while 93% of texels in the packed Ptex texture contain data. Additionally, the packed Ptex texture contains all the mip-map levels instead of just a single level. The packed Ptex texture needs only 10% extra texels added to accelerate bilinear texture filtering. This rather modest increase in size can be eliminated at the cost of manually performing interpolation in shader.