In article <382### [at] 194174214110> , lut### [at] stmuccom (Lutz 
Kretzschmar) wrote:

>> Hmm, distance based recursive anti-aliasing should solve this problem -
>> determine the recursion level by the distance of the intersection.
>
> That is computationally much too expensive. Since the antialiasing has
> already been done by making a mipmap, it is not neccessary to fire
> extra rays. And once you start getting far away you would have to
> antialias far too many rays.

Yes, just for imagemaps. But that wasn't my point; it simply is a primitive
method that works with procedural textures as well.

My suggestion does of course not eliminate 'the missing a small object (or
texture detail) problem', it would only reduce it  by forcing a certain
recursion level depending on the distance (rather than only the threshold).

However, it is not difficult to construct a case (i.e. with a checker
pattern) that would easily break it - like all (recursive) antialiasing
based methods.


    thorsten


____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
e-mail: tho### [at] trfde

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