Silhouette Maps for Improved Texture Magnification

 Slide 4 of 61 [index] [first] [prev] [next]  

In 1999, Quake3 Arena was released. At this point in time, graphics hardware acceleration is starting to become commonplace in consumer-level PC's, so we are now starting to see more advanced filtering of the textures.

In this screenshot from the game we can see that the skull at the base of the pillar is no longer as pixelated as in the previous examples, but is rather a bit blurry instead. This is an indication that the rendering engine is now using bilinear-interpolation filtering for the magnified texture.

This filtering technique trades off the pixelation artifacts for a blurry appearance.

As presented at SIGGRAPH/EUROGRAPHICS Graphics Hardware 2004
by Pradeep Sen on August 30, 2004