Archive for August, 2008

Experiments in Ray-Tracing, Part 8: Anti-Aliasing

In this article I’ll explain how to perform anti-aliasing quickly, getting 5x sampling for a cost of just 2x the time.
Anti-aliasing is a technique to remove the “jaggies” in a rendered image. Let’s start with the standard shiny-balls-on-a-chessboard:

I’ve zoomed into the image a little, so that you can see the pixellated edges.
Anti-aliasing is most simply [...]

Disaster Strikes!

We finally launched our new product at the start of this month. Basically, EasyAs123Web.com will allow small businesses to create and edit their own website, for about $150 per year. Anyway, enough plugging. On to a bit of background.
One of the features I wanted to include was seamless image integration with the user’s chosen website [...]

Experiments in Ray-Tracing, Part 7: Multi-Threading

Now that I’ve covered the basics of ray-tracing, I’ll cover a few optimization techniques I’ve tried. Optimizations can be placed into three broad categories:

Those which speed up the ray-tracing, without affecting the image;
Those which speed up the ray-tracing, but degrade the image quality, and;
Those which improve the image quality, but slow down the ray-tracing.

Obviously implementing [...]

Development Companies – Strengths and Weaknesses

It’s been a manic month here at BinaryComponents – we’ve finally released our latest web application -
http://www.easyas123web.com
- blatant plug there – and of course there’s still a ton of work to be done on it. It’s times like these that make me wish I had a team of ten, to make progress through the inevitable [...]