Transparency and Anti-Aliasing Techniques for Real-Time Rendering

Transparency and anti-aliasing are crucial to enhance realism in computer-generated images, which have a high demand for such effects. Transparency is largely used to denote relationships among objects in a scene, and to render several structures, such as particles and foliage. Anti-aliasing (AA) is also important, since jagged edges can be easily spotted and create disruptive distractions during a scene walkthrough, which are unacceptable in real-time applications. Figure 1 illustrates both effects. In common, they have the fact that they rely on processing discrete samples from a given function, but using the samples for different purposes. In this tutorial we review state-of the-art techniques for transparency and anti-aliasing effects, their initial ideas and subsequent GPU accelerations. We support our presentation with a discussion on their strengths and limitations.