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Alpha Distribution for Alpha Testing

Published:25 July 2018Publication History
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Abstract

Alpha testing is widely used for rendering surfaces with transparency. While it works well when transparency is a binary function, semi-transparent regions cause problems, as they are classified as either fully transparent or opaque. Unfortunately, semi-transparent texture regions often appear in coarser mipmap levels, causing surfaces to disappear with distance. We introduce the alpha distribution approach for pre-processing the alpha values of a texture such that alpha testing produces expected results with semi-transparency without any modification to render-time operations. We describe two separate algorithms for alpha distribution with similar qualitative behavior. Our results show that alpha distribution can produce high-quality results with low noise. We also explain how alpha distribution can be extended for high-quality rendering with alpha-to-coverage.

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    • Published in

      cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques
      Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques  Volume 1, Issue 1
      July 2018
      378 pages
      EISSN:2577-6193
      DOI:10.1145/3242771
      Issue’s Table of Contents

      Copyright © 2018 ACM

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      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      • Published: 25 July 2018
      Published in pacmcgit Volume 1, Issue 1

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