I have to write an essay on Anti-aliasing, anyone do anything like this before and care to share their work?

good answer illepall
been there done that

I guess it's important to know how long this essay should be, and how deep into detail you should go. I would definetely include some benchmarks, and some tech comparision, including transparent aa stuff...
Then you could write dis- / advantages of the various aa types, such as multisampling, supersampling, etc...
Taking a look at google can really help there imo

Quote from ORION :

I guess it's important to know how long this essay should be, and how deep into detail you should go. I would definetely include some benchmarks, and some tech comparision, including transparent aa stuff...
Then you could write dis- / advantages of the various aa types, such as multisampling, supersampling, etc...
Taking a look at google can really help there imo

Thanks for your answer ORION, it has to be about 2000 words, not too bad but i'm crap at writing essays
I have already looked at google and i have a fairly good idea about how to tackle it, just looking for someone elses opinions. i've started writing up the pros and cons of different methods of aa.

My approach would be something like the following
1. Why we need AA
- Talk about information loss during digitalization (Zoomed examples).
- Talk about the rasterization approach in rendering. One pixel belongs to one object.
- Talk about human perception, one percieved point belongs to several real "points" (each is blurred to a specific extend).
- Examples
2. How AA works in theory
- Talk about interpolation
3. How AA works in practice
- Supersampling, etc.
4. Some more examples

Vain

AA is a very general concept and relates to visual of CGI (computer generated images) on raster (bitmap-based) displays. It means smoothing out the edges of rendered objects on screen according to one of several algorithms related to the domain of the problem. Usually it requires the ability to render the object in higher resolution than that of the display, and then "adapt" (usually subsample) the high resolution render to the low resolution display.

example:
AA of shapes (lines, circles, etc).
AA of text (in windows there's "plain" and "clear-type" which is suited for LCD)
AA of 3D scenes

Each of the above domains has different techniques and various methods to smooth out the look.

hope it's a good start

3dcenter has a few good articles on aa (some of which are also available in english if you cant read german http://www.3dcenter.de/artikel/ )

Cool thanks for the info guys and thanks for the link Shotglass

I think looking at the images in the article already explains a low, specially when you move the mouse over them and get another image.
Sadly, the AA articles seem to be in German only, but Im sure you can find other ones, maybe wikipedia

http://www.3dcenter.de/artikel/anti-aliasing/
http://www.3dcenter.de/artikel/anti-aliasing-masken/

lol! Wikipedia has been the sourse of most of the essay so far....

An essay on AA????

Must be boring. Or is it for a computer class of some sort? My English teachers would certaintly not enjoy reading about something like that at least

It's one of my modules called "Graphics". all about rendering and so on...

you could of course try to explain a few things with knowledge about signals and system theory (if you happen to have any knowledge in that field)

Quote from Shotglass :

you could of course try to explain a few things with knowledge about signals and system theory (if you happen to have any knowledge in that field)

actually this is more related to mipmaps. AA is usually plain super/sub sampling

[edit]
it seems i'm wrong afterall in the gereral usage of the term. However, the common usage of the term is for edges of CGI objects, and not inside textures, where mipmapping is usually used. I'll kepp the original post though
[/edit]

the term aliasing doesnt care where the edge (ie the frequencies too high to sample) occur so generaly it doenst matte if youre talking about polygon edges or edges inside textures ... but nowerdays the approaches to deal with those two problems are very different