[virtualritz]

UVs are not needed any more since a long time. They have many drawbacks (the first one being that they are explicit).

The renderers I used in production, when I left the VFX industry ca. 2010, all supported PTEX [http://ptex.us/ptexpaper.html].

Blender seems to have WIP support for it too nowadays [ https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Nicholasbishop/Ptex]

[daredevildave]

They are still very much required for games/real-time rendering :-)

I hadn't heard ptex before, it's interesting stuff. Sounds like the reason it isn't in general usage for realtime stuff is the memory overhead: http://sebastiansylvan.com/post/casting-a-critical-eye-on-gp...