Ray Tracing from the Ground Up

Chapter 4

Antialiasing

Image courtesy of Peter Brownlow

Objectives

By the end of this chapter you should:

• understand what aliasing is and what causes it in ray tracing;
• understand why you can’t completely eliminate aliasing in all ray-traced images;
• have implemented antialiasing in the bare-bones ray tracer with uniform, random, and jittered sampling patterns.

Computers are discrete devices that display a finite number of pixels, work with a finite number of colors, and in the case of ray tracing, sample scenes at a finite number of discrete points. As such, most ray-traced images are subject to aliasing, where an alias means a substitute ...