Crazy. I spent 3 years in school for animation right in the heart of disneyworld and never heard of it. Or maybe I did and just forgot, or they called it something different at the time. It was 2006 afterall. Regardless, quads were stressed for animation, rigging and artifacting during render. We still had to UV map everything we did by hand. The closest thing I remember using like that would be Maya's node based projections. That doesn't require mapping either. It just projects whatever image it has onto whatever surface you aim it at. It doesn't care whether you use tris, quads or ngons. Can be much more of a pita to work with than it sounds tho. 

In the early days of zbrush, it had its own per-face mapping. But a map still had to be generated. It just wasn't readable by human eyes. I don't know if you can still do it that way in zb now or not. Haven't bothered to look.

 

~Shane