Anti-Aliasing Problem and Mipmapping
Figure 8: Illustrates the anti-aliasing problem as you view further along the image. Taken from Rick’s blog http://tower22.blogspot.com/2011_10_01_archive
Consider having a high resolution texture on a mesh plane. When this texture is viewed from a close distance, everything is visually in place however, when viewed from a distance, the texture becomes distorted and out of place, figure 8. The distortion is also called Moire Pattern. The solution for this is to introduce Lance William’s Mip Mapping technique which was specifically developed to solve this [11].
MipMapping
Figure 9: An illustration of the mipmapping technique where each images starting from the original are being scaled in half until the remaining image is of dimension 1x1. Taken from Chad Vernon’s blog, http://www.chadvernon.com/blog/resources/managed-directx-2/texture
Mipmaps are precalculated scaled versions of an original texture. Observe the pattern of each mipmap as it decreases in size; it is half the dimension of the previous one. This pattern is repeated until the last mipmap’s dimension is 1×1. Take a look at figure 9 to see this technique. Now look at the difference between the checkerboard image before and after the application of the mipmapping technique, figure 10.
Figure 10: Illustrates the difference in quality when using mip-mapping, left image represents before mip-mapping is applied while right shows after mip-mapping is applied. Taken from Rick’s blog http://tower22.blogspot.com/2011_10_01_archive.html
The next topic will now discuss the different mapping techniques that could be used in this assignment. In particular, the section will discuss its advantages and limitations.
textureingraphics 