[Award Winner] Bitmapped Images - The technical side of things explained.

[Redrobes]

Ok so we have an aliasing issue, what we need is an aliasing busting technique - cue antialiasing.

Antialiasing is all about doing stuff at a higher sample rate than the final, filtering and then resampling to the final rate. The idea is that the effects that would have been present from the undersample will be beyond the filter and therefore not in the final image. So were back to our zebra. If the camera had filtered off any higher frequencies than the pixel sample rate then as the stripes on the leg of the zebra got thinner then eventually they would blur out and become a solid mid gray color. And then as it got farther away still the whole animal would become solid gray but would at least look better than the new stripes from the earlier example.

So, always work at a higher resolution than the final. Make a copy of the high resolution image and blur it just a little so that a few pixels blur together and then resample it smaller to final size. If going 2 to 1 then blur just enough for two pixels to look like a single blob and then make half the size, if going 10 to 1 then blur so that 10 pixels become one blob and then make one tenth the size.

This form of antialising is known as "super sampling" it is the type also known as "Full Screen Antialiasing" (FSAA) when setting up video cards for games.