| Submitted by , posted on 18 April 2002 |

Image Description, by One day I realized that implementing texture magnification by using simple bilinear filter is just not good enough. Very often, a texture contains several color-uniform areas with apparent borders between them and these borders get blurred as the rest of the texture. Just start any modern FPS game, move a character very close to a wall with some sign on it, and if the texture resolution is not high enough, you_ll experience a "bad eyes" effect - everything looks too blurry, you don't see any sharp borders anymore.
In order to solve this problem, I developed my own "smart" texture filter. It keeps borders between color-uniform areas look sharp regardless of texture magnification level and, at the same time, keeps interiors of those areas as smooth as bilinear filter does.
The idea is to use independent interpolation function for each group of four adjacent texels. I developed a set of such functions - most of them describe how border(s) intersect the interval between these texels_ centers. To determine, which function to use for each group of four texels, some additional information needs to be stored along with a texture. In my demo, I used 8 additional bits per texel for that purpose. Because these interpolation functions describe pretty much a sub-texel level of the texture, on preprocessing (analyzing) stage I had to use a much bigger version of the same texture. For example, for this demo I analyzed 2048x1024 image to get the final 512x128 texture with correct interpolation function information.
You can find the demo and full source code at www.HiEnd3D.com/demos.html. I used software rendering for obvious reasons, so please don_t expect very high speed. Artwork is inspired by M.C. Esher drawings.
Fell free to ask any questions. Comments and suggestions are very welcomed.
Maxim Stepin.

[prev] | Image of the Day Gallery www.flipcode.com | [next]

Copyright 1999-2008 (C) FLIPCODE.COM and/or the original content author(s). All rights reserved.
Please read our Terms, Conditions, and Privacy information.