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The part about ridiculous resolutions for texture detail like leaves isn't necessarily true. There are very old techniques for scattering small decals densely a

The part about ridiculous resolutions for texture detail like leaves isn't necessarily true. There are very old techniques for scattering small decals densely across surfaces. The basic trick is to use coarse textures that encode the positioning of decals within each texel footprint.

derefr 5y ago
Sure, but no matter what the geometry/bump maps/etc. are on the road, they're not going to render out as anything but an aliased, badly-lit mess unless you're heavily supersampling them (and then doing ray-tracing to the supersampled image.) We're talking about "objects" where the crucial detail-features of their meshes for getting correct color math out (e.g. the normal+reflectance maps) would be, on average, scaled to be smaller than a pixel from the viewing distance+angle, with potentially many objects contributing to the final color of each pixel. So, rather than rendering the road at 8x-16x and then downsampling it, in order to get a pile of leaves to appear to have ~1.5x LoD at the projection plane, you can just achieve that 1.5x LoD pixel by pixel at the projection plane. Or, to put that another way: when a digital artist is painting a landscape, they don't have to zoom in by 8x, paint every individual blade of grass, and then zoom out. They can just use an artistic technique at 1x zoom that approximates the texture that would have been created by downsampling "photographic" detail painted in at 8x to your screen resolution. Here, the ML model is playing the role of the digital artist, "painting" on the projection plane.
enriquto 5y ago
The problem is not texture antialiasing (which is essentially solved). The problem is shape antialiasing, whether many distant small shapes are so close together that become a sort of translucent buzz, which is very computationally heavy to compute.
- gmueckl 5y ago
  REYES renderers had a pretty nifty solution for shape antialiasing with their slicing and dicing of geometry into sub-pixel sized primitives. That was in the 80s, just for reference. Unfortunately, this method has a pretty complex implementation and just doesn't play all that well with hardware rasterization or path tracing and has since fallen out of favor.

derefr 5y ago

Sure, but no matter what the geometry/bump maps/etc. are on the road, they're not going to render out as anything but an aliased, badly-lit mess unless you're heavily supersampling them (and then doing ray-tracing to the supersampled image.) We're talking about "objects" where the crucial detail-features of their meshes for getting correct color math out (e.g. the normal+reflectance maps) would be, on average, scaled to be smaller than a pixel from the viewing distance+angle, with potentially many objects contributing to the final color of each pixel. So, rather than rendering the road at 8x-16x and then downsampling it, in order to get a pile of leaves to appear to have ~1.5x LoD at the projection plane, you can just achieve that 1.5x LoD pixel by pixel at the projection plane. Or, to put that another way: when a digital artist is painting a landscape, they don't have to zoom in by 8x, paint every individual blade of grass, and then zoom out. They can just use an artistic technique at 1x zoom that approximates the texture that would have been created by downsampling "photographic" detail painted in at 8x to your screen resolution. Here, the ML model is playing the role of the digital artist, "painting" on the projection plane.

enriquto 5y ago

The problem is not texture antialiasing (which is essentially solved). The problem is shape antialiasing, whether many distant small shapes are so close together that become a sort of translucent buzz, which is very computationally heavy to compute.

gmueckl 5y ago
REYES renderers had a pretty nifty solution for shape antialiasing with their slicing and dicing of geometry into sub-pixel sized primitives. That was in the 80s, just for reference. Unfortunately, this method has a pretty complex implementation and just doesn't play all that well with hardware rasterization or path tracing and has since fallen out of favor.