Dart gets Antialisasing.
Posted 2005-12-17-0943
Just before Chirstmas, I added Antialisasing to Dart. This is part of a bigger plan to get block rendering going. This included creating a RenderingAlgorithm baseclass (with default implementation in DefaultRenderingAlgorithm).
The AntialisasingMethod baseclass takes normalised coordinates (and pixel widths) and returns the colour. The default implementation in that class casts one ray for each pixel. To prove that AA works, I created a new library, dartaamethods, and in it create AaStaticFour. This subdivides every pixel into four and averages the colour from each of them. It is a very basic form of AA, but it does some to some extent. I plan to add other AA methods, including dynamic and recursive methods soon (say, the next 6 months.)
Spliting RenderingAlgorithm out of Dart could allow some like, say, Ollie, to write faster ray tracers, and myself a chance to work on some optimisations without distrubing things too much.
I will probably do a release once I have block rendering going. There are some fairly substantial to fix to get full parallel renderer going.