Talk

Rendering

When a rendering engine has to render any given object there are two possible ways of doing this. One is to paint all pixels that fall in the middle of the shape. But the problem with this approach is that even though it is fast, on systems with large pixels you end up with a jagged effect. For example when zooming in on pictures you see this problem. This mechanism of painting only the middle of all shapes is called aliasing.

The better mechanism is anti-aliasing. In this method, the redering engine calculates the intersection of every pixel with the shape and coloring them in propotion with how they're present. This way if a pixel is not completely covered by a shape it is still colored but at a lower intensity.

How does this work: The rendering engine calculates the coverage values for all the pixels affected by the shape. These alpha values