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Thanks heaps dahart for your extremely thoughtful reply! I totally see what you're getting at and I feel silly for having even accidentally suggested that Morga

Thanks heaps dahart for your extremely thoughtful reply! I totally see what you're getting at and I feel silly for having even accidentally suggested that Morgan was not across anything tbh! I still think that even an extremely cursory mention about how to make pixels like 'We will average samples from N rays within each pixel as our antialiasing strategy, this is equivalent to box-filtering (see citations [X][Y][Z])" I think something like that would be pretty helpful just to connect the dots between the amazing ideas in the book and actual-pixel-production. (Filtering/signal-processing is not totally a pet-favorite idea btw, I just think it's good to have a mention of it so that it's at least connected with the rest of a graphics-HOWTO in a non-abstract way) Very interesting point about AI-based denoisers too.. definitely changes the pixel-filtering situation in an interesting way! Although I'm super interested in it I'm sticking my fingers in my ears about that for the moment!

dahart 2y ago
Fair point, you’re right it could/should mention box filters somewhere. It has the let’s average samples over a pixel part, and it has decent citations (I noticed Alvy Ray Smith’s “A Pixel is Not a Little Square”). Connecting the averaging to basic terminology is a completely reasonable thing to do. Apologies I didn’t mean to suggest filtering is your pet topic, filtering is very important (and fun & fascinating), mandatory for a graphics education, I only wanted to point out there are other equally deserving topics for an intro book/course. I was lucky enough to take graphics from Peter Shirley, and the first two topics he covered were filtering and colors, in depth. I’d never truly understood the shortcomings of box filtering until he had us rendering a 2d sinc function and try to get rid of any hint of aliasing with a million samples per pixel. That assignment made it really tangible and visceral, gave real practical intuition for filtering that stuck with me. Definitely start playing with denoisers. There’s a lot to do and it needs people who care about filtering to scrutinize it.

dahart 2y ago

Fair point, you’re right it could/should mention box filters somewhere. It has the let’s average samples over a pixel part, and it has decent citations (I noticed Alvy Ray Smith’s “A Pixel is Not a Little Square”). Connecting the averaging to basic terminology is a completely reasonable thing to do. Apologies I didn’t mean to suggest filtering is your pet topic, filtering is very important (and fun & fascinating), mandatory for a graphics education, I only wanted to point out there are other equally deserving topics for an intro book/course. I was lucky enough to take graphics from Peter Shirley, and the first two topics he covered were filtering and colors, in depth. I’d never truly understood the shortcomings of box filtering until he had us rendering a 2d sinc function and try to get rid of any hint of aliasing with a million samples per pixel. That assignment made it really tangible and visceral, gave real practical intuition for filtering that stuck with me. Definitely start playing with denoisers. There’s a lot to do and it needs people who care about filtering to scrutinize it.