The A -buffer, an antialiased hidden surface method

Subscribe (Full Service)


	Search: The ACM Digital Library The Guide

	Feedback
Take a look at the new version of this page: [ beta version ]. Tell us what you think.

The A -buffer, an antialiased hidden surface method

Full text

Pdf (554 KB)

Source

ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics archive
Volume 18 , Issue 3 (July 1984) table of contents

Pages: 103 - 108

Year of Publication: 1984

ISSN:0097-8930

Also published in ...

Author

Loren Carpenter

Computer Graphics Project, Computer Division, Lucasfilm Ltd

Publisher

ACM New York, NY, USA

Bibliometrics

Downloads (6 Weeks): 41, Downloads (12 Months): 296, Citation Count: 88

Additional Information:

abstract references cited by index terms collaborative colleagues

Tools and Actions:	Request Permissions Review this Article Save this Article to a Binder Display Formats: BibTeX EndNote ACM Ref

DOI Bookmark:	Use this link to bookmark this Article: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/964965.808585 What is a DOI?

Warning: The download time has expired please click on the item to try again.

ABSTRACT

The A-buffer (anti-aliased, area-averaged, accumulation buffer) is a general hidden surface mechanism suited to medium scale virtual memory computers. It resolves visibility among an arbitrary collection of opaque, transparent, and intersecting objects. Using an easy to compute Fourier window (box filter), it increases the effective image resolution many times over the Z-buffer, with a moderate increase in cost. The A-buffer is incorporated into the REYES 3-D rendering system at Lucasfilm and was used successfully in the “Genesis Demo” sequence in Star Trek II.

REFERENCES

Note: OCR errors may be found in this Reference List extracted from the full text article. ACM has opted to expose the complete List rather than only correct and linked references.

	1	CARPENTER, L., "A New Hidden Surface Algorithm," Proceedings of NW76, ACM, Seattle, WA, 1976.
	2	CATMULL, E., A Subdivision Algorithm for Computer Display of Curved Surfaces, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, December 1974.
	3	Edwin Catmull, A hidden-surface algorithm with anti-aliasing, ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics, v.12 n.3, p.6-11, August 1978
	4	Eugene Fiume , Alain Fournier , Larry Rudolph, A parallel scan conversion algorithm with anti-aliasing for a general-purpose ultracomputer, ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics, v.17 n.3, p.141-150, July 1983
	5	Jeffrey M. Lane , Loren C. Carpenter , Turner Whitted , James F. Blinn, Scan line methods for displaying parametrically defined surfaces, Communications of the ACM, v.23 n.1, p.23-34, Jan. 1980 [doi>10.1145/358808.358815]
	6	Thomas Porter , Tom Duff, Compositing digital images, ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics, v.18 n.3, p.253-259, July 1984
	7	Ivan E. Sutherland , Robert F. Sproull , Robert A. Schumacker, A Characterization of Ten Hidden-Surface Algorithms, ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), v.6 n.1, p.1-55, March 1974 [doi>10.1145/356625.356626]
	8	Kevin Weiler , Peter Atherton, Hidden surface removal using polygon area sorting, ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics, v.11 n.2, p.214-222, Summer 1977

CITED BY 88

	Jay Torborg , James T. Kajiya, Talisman: commodity realtime 3D graphics for the PC, Proceedings of the 23rd annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.353-363, August 1996
	Stephanie Winner , Mike Kelley , Brent Pease , Bill Rivard , Alex Yen, Hardware accelerated rendering of antialiasing using a modified a-buffer algorithm, Proceedings of the 24th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.307-316, August 1997
	Bruce Anderson , Andy Stewart , Rob MacAulay , Turner Whitted, Accommodating memory latency in a low-cost rasterizer, Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH/EUROGRAPHICS workshop on Graphics hardware, p.97-101, August 03-04, 1997, Los Angeles, California, United States
	Lee Westover, Interactive volume rendering, Proceedings of the 1989 Chapel Hill workshop on Volume visualization, p.9-16, May 1989, Chapel Hill, Noth Carolina, United States
	Craig M. Wittenbrink, R-buffer: a pointerless A-buffer hardware architecture, Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH/EUROGRAPHICS workshop on Graphics hardware, p.73-80, August 2001, Los Angeles, California, United States
	William R. Mark , Kekoa Proudfoot, The F-buffer: a rasterization-order FIFO buffer for multi-pass rendering, Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH/EUROGRAPHICS workshop on Graphics hardware, p.57-64, August 2001, Los Angeles, California, United States
	R. Victor Klassen, Drawing antialiased cubic spline curves, ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), v.10 n.1, p.92-108, Jan. 1991
	Gavin Miller, Efficient algorithms for local and global accessibility shading, Proceedings of the 21st annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.319-326, July 1994
	Tom Duff, Interval arithmetic recursive subdivision for implicit functions and constructive solid geometry, ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics, v.26 n.2, p.131-138, July 1992
	Michael Potmesil , Eric M. Hoffert, FRAMES: Software tools for modeling, rendering and animation of 3D scenes, ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics, v.21 n.4, p.85-94, July 1987
	Henry Fuchs , Jack Goldfeather , Jeff P. Hultquist , Susan Spach , John D. Austin , Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. , John G. Eyles , John Poulton, Fast spheres, shadows, textures, transparencies, and imgage enhancements in pixel-planes, ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics, v.19 n.3, p.111-120, Jul. 1985
	Mikio Shinya, Spatial anti-aliasing for animation sequences with spatio-temporal filtering, Proceedings of the 20th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.289-296, September 1993
	Brian Apgar , Bret Bersack , Abraham Mammen, A display system for the Stellar graphics supercomputer model GS1000, ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics, v.22 n.4, p.255-262, Aug. 1988
	Jin-Aeon Lee , Lee-Sup Kim, Single-pass full-screen hardware accelerated antialiasing, Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH/EUROGRAPHICS workshop on Graphics hardware, p.67-75, August 21-22, 2000, Interlaken, Switzerland
	Norman P. Jouppi , Chun-Fa Chang, Z3: an economical hardware technique for high-quality antialiasing and transparency, Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH/EUROGRAPHICS workshop on Graphics hardware, p.85-93, August 08-09, 1999, Los Angeles, California, United States
	David Salesin , Jorge Stolfi, Rendering CSG models with a ZZ-buffer, ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics, v.24 n.4, p.67-76, Aug. 1990
	Paul Haeberli , Kurt Akeley, The accumulation buffer: hardware support for high-quality rendering, ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics, v.24 n.4, p.309-318, Aug. 1990
	Ned Greene , Michael Kass, Error-bounded antialiased rendering of complex environments, Proceedings of the 21st annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.59-66, July 1994
	Michael Kelley , Kirk Gould , Brent Pease , Stephanie Winner , Alex Yen, Hardware accelerated rendering of CSG and transparency, Proceedings of the 21st annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.177-184, July 1994
	Takafumi Saito , Tokiichiro Takahashi, Comprehensible rendering of 3-D shapes, ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics, v.24 n.4, p.197-206, Aug. 1990
	Samuel Boivin , André Gagalowicz, Advanced computer vision and graphics collaboration techniques for image-based rendering, Imaging and vision systems: theory, assessment and applications, Nova Science Publishers, Inc., Commack, NY, 2001
	Frederick M. Weinhaus , Venkat Devarajan, Texture mapping 3D models of real-world scenes, ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), v.29 n.4, p.325-365, Dec. 1997
	Andrew Glassner, Adaptive precision in texture mapping, ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics, v.20 n.4, p.297-306, Aug. 1986
	Karl Sims, Particle animation and rendering using data parallel computation, ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics, v.24 n.4, p.405-413, Aug. 1990
	Tim Van Hook, Real-time shaded NC milling display, ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics, v.20 n.4, p.15-20, Aug. 1986
	Ricardo Farias , Joseph S. B. Mitchell , Cláudio T. Silva, ZSWEEP: an efficient and exact projection algorithm for unstructured volume rendering, Proceedings of the 2000 IEEE symposium on Volume visualization, p.91-99, October 09-10, 2000, Salt Lake City, Utah, United States
	Hanspeter Pfister , Matthias Zwicker , Jeroen van Baar , Markus Gross, Surfels: surface elements as rendering primitives, Proceedings of the 27th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.335-342, July 2000
	Samuel Boivin , Andre Gagalowicz, Image-based rendering of diffuse, specular and glossy surfaces from a single image, Proceedings of the 28th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.107-116, August 2001
	Kevin Kreeger , Arie Kaufman, Mixing translucent polygons with volumes, Proceedings of the conference on Visualization '99: celebrating ten years, p.191-198, October 1999, San Francisco, California, United States
	Andreas Schilling , Wolfgang Straßer, EXACT: algorithm and hardware architecture for an improved A-buffer, Proceedings of the 20th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.85-91, September 1993
	Hansong Zhang , Dinesh Manocha , Tom Hudson , Kenneth E. Hoff, III, Visibility culling using hierarchical occlusion maps, Proceedings of the 24th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.77-88, August 1997
	Marcus D. Waller , Jon P. Ewins , Martin White , Paul F. Lister, Efficient Coverage Mask Generation for Antialiasing, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, v.20 n.6, p.86-93, November 2000
	M. R. Stytz , G. Frieder , O. Frieder, Three-dimensional medical imaging: algorithms and computer systems, ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), v.23 n.4, p.421-499, Dec. 1991
	Matthias Zwicker , Hanspeter Pfister , Jeroen van Baar , Markus Gross, Surface splatting, Proceedings of the 28th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.371-378, August 2001
	Ned Greene, Hierarchical polygon tiling with coverage masks, Proceedings of the 23rd annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.65-74, August 1996
	M. R. Stytz , G. Frieder , O. Frieder, Three-dimensional medical imaging: algorithms and computer systems, ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), v.23 n.4, p.421-499, Dec. 1991
	D. S. Ebert , Richard E. Parent, Rendering and animation of gaseous phenomena by combining fast volume and scanline A-buffer techniques, ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics, v.24 n.4, p.357-366, Aug. 1990
	Cláudio T. Silva , Joseph S. B. Mitchell , Peter L. Williams, An exact interactive time visibility ordering algorithm for polyhedral cell complexes, Proceedings of the 1998 IEEE symposium on Volume visualization, p.87-94, October 19-20, 1998, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, United States
	Koen Meinds , Bart Barenbrug, Resample hardware for 3D graphics, Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH/EUROGRAPHICS conference on Graphics hardware, September 01-02, 2002, Saarbrucken, Germany
	Kurt Akeley, Reality Engine graphics, Proceedings of the 20th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.109-116, September 1993
	Larry Bergman , Henry Fuchs , Eric Grant , Susan Spach, Image rendering by adaptive refinement, ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics, v.20 n.4, p.29-37, Aug. 1986
	Darwyn R. Peachey, Modeling waves and surf, ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics, v.20 n.4, p.65-74, Aug. 1986
	Taosong He , Lichan Hong , Amitabh Varshney , Sidney W. Wang, Controlled Topology Simplification, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, v.2 n.2, p.171-184, June 1996
	Phillip K. Robertson, Spatial Transformations for Rapid Scan-Line Surface Shadowing, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, v.9 n.2, p.30-38, March 1989
	Marc Levoy, Volume Rendering, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, v.10 n.2, p.33-40, March 1990
	K. Sung , A. Pearce , C. Wang, Spatial-Temporal Antialiasing, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, v.8 n.2, p.144-153, April 2002
	Bruce Lucas, A scientific visualization renderer, Proceedings of the 3rd conference on Visualization '92, October 19-23, 1992, Boston, Massachusetts
	Kalpathi R. Subramanian , Bruce F. Naylor, Converting Discrete Images to Partitioning Trees, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, v.3 n.3, p.273-288, July 1997
	Anthony C. Barkans, High quality rendering using the Talisman architecture, Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH/EUROGRAPHICS workshop on Graphics hardware, p.79-88, August 03-04, 1997, Los Angeles, California, United States
	Greg Abram , Lee Westover, Efficient alias-free rendering using bit-masks and look-up tables, ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics, v.19 n.3, p.53-59, Jul. 1985
	Andreas Schilling, A new simple and efficient antialiasing with subpixel masks, ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics, v.25 n.4, p.133-141, July 1991
	Matthias Zwicker , Hanspeter Pfister , Jeroen van Baar , Markus Gross, EWA Splatting, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, v.8 n.3, p.223-238, July 2002
	Peter L. Williams, Visibility-ordering meshed polyhedra, ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), v.11 n.2, p.103-126, April 1992
	Tom Duff, Compositing 3-D rendered images, ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics, v.19 n.3, p.41-44, Jul. 1985
	William R. Mark , Gary Bishop, Memory access patterns of occlusion-compatible 3D image warping, Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH/EUROGRAPHICS workshop on Graphics hardware, p.35-44, August 03-04, 1997, Los Angeles, California, United States
	Alain Fournier , Donald Fussell, On the power of the frame buffer, ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), v.7 n.2, p.103-128, April 1988
	Ricardo Farias , Cláudio T. Silva, Out-Of-Core Rendering of Large, Unstructured Grids, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, v.21 n.4, p.42-50, July 2001
	R. Victor Klassen, Increasing the Apparent Addressability of Supersampling Grids, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, v.13 n.5, p.74-77, September 1993
	Eric Haines , Steven Worley, Fast, low memory Z-buffering when performing medium-quality rendering, Journal of Graphics Tools, v.1 n.3, p.1-6, 1996
	Timo Aila , Ville Miettinen , Petri Nordlund, Delay streams for graphics hardware, ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), v.22 n.3, July 2003
	Bradley A. Payne , Arthur W. Toga, Medical Imaging: Surface Mapping Brain Function on 3D Models, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, v.10 n.5, p.33-41, September 1990
	Graham J. Dunnett , Martin White , Paul F. Lister , Richard L. Grimsdale, The Image Chip for High Performance 3D Rendering, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, v.12 n.6, p.41-52, November 1992
	Ming Wan , Nan Zhang , Huamin Qu , Arie E. Kaufman, Interactive Stereoscopic Rendering of Volumetric Environments, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, v.10 n.1, p.15-28, January 2004
	Philippe Beaudoin , Pierre Poulin, Compressed multisampling for efficient hardware edge antialiasing, Proceedings of the 2004 conference on Graphics interface, p.169-176, May 17-19, 2004, London, Ontario, Canada
	Wai-Sum Lin , Rynson W. H. Lau , Kai Hwang , Xiaola Lin , Paul Y. S. Cheung, Adaptive Parallel Rendering on Multiprocessors and Workstation Clusters, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, v.12 n.3, p.241-258, March 2001
	Abraham Mammen, Transparency and Antialiasing Algorithms Implemented with the Virtual Pixel Maps Technique, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, v.9 n.4, p.43-55, July 1989
	Bradley A. Payne , Arthur W. Toga, Distance Field Manipulation of Surface Models, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, v.12 n.1, p.65-71, January 1992
	Steven P. Callahan , Milan Ikits , Joao L. D. Comba , Claudio T. Silva, Hardware-Assisted Visibility Sorting for Unstructured Volume Rendering, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, v.11 n.3, p.285-295, May 2005
	Richard Cook , Nelson Max , Claudio T. Silva , Peter L. Williams, Image-Space Visibility Ordering for Cell Projection Volume Rendering of Unstructured Data, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, v.10 n.6, p.695-707, November 2004
	Juan-Roberto Jiménez , Karol Myszkowski , Xavier Pueyo, Interactive global illumination in dynamic participating media using selective photon tracing, Proceedings of the 21st spring conference on Computer graphics, May 12-14, 2005, Budmerice, Slovakia
	Naga K. Govindaraju , Michael Henson , Ming C. Lin , Dinesh Manocha, Interactive visibility ordering and transparency computations among geometric primitives in complex environments, Proceedings of the 2005 symposium on Interactive 3D graphics and games, April 03-06, 2005, Washington, District of Columbia
	Erwin de Groot , Brian Wyvill, Rayskip: faster ray tracing of implicit surface animations, Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques in Australasia and South East Asia, November 29-December 02, 2005, Dunedin, New Zealand
	Liviu Coconu , Hans-Christian Hege, Hardware-accelerated point-based rendering of complex scenes, Proceedings of the 13th Eurographics workshop on Rendering, June 26-28, 2002, Pisa, Italy
	Ji Lu , Hock Soon Seah , Feng Tian, Computer-assisted cel animation: post-processing after inbetweening, Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques in Australasia and South East Asia, February 11-14, 2003, Melbourne, Australia
	Voicu Popescu , Paul Rosen, Forward rasterization, ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), v.25 n.2, p.375-411, April 2006
	Louis Bavoil , Steven P. Callahan , Aaron Lefohn , João L. D. Comba , Cláudio T. Silva, Multi-fragment effects on the GPU using the k-buffer, Proceedings of the 2007 symposium on Interactive 3D graphics and games, April 30-May 02, 2007, Seattle, Washington
	Woo-Chan Park , Cheong-Ghil Kim , Duk-Ki Yoon , Kil-Whan Lee , Il-San Kim , Tack-Don Han, A consistency-free memory architecture for sort-last parallel rendering processors, Journal of Systems Architecture: the EUROMICRO Journal, v.53 n.5-6, p.272-284, May, 2007
	Huamin Qu , Arie Kaufman , Ran Shao , Ankush Kumar, A Framework for Sample-Based Rendering with O-Buffers, Proceedings of the 14th IEEE Visualization 2003 (VIS'03), p.58, October 22-24, 2003
	Taosong He , Lichan Hong , A. Kaufman , A. Varshney , S. Wang, Voxel based object simplification, Proceedings of the 6th conference on Visualization '95, p.296, October 29-November 03, 1995
	Peter Shirley , Allan Tuchman, A polygonal approximation to direct scalar volume rendering, ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics, v.24 n.5, p.63-70, Nov. 1990
	Ping-Kang Hsiung , Robert H. Thibadeau , Michael Wu, T-buffer: fast visualization of relativistic effects in space-time, ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics, v.24 n.2, p.83-88, Mar. 1990
	Forrester Cole , Adam Finkelstein, Partial visibility for stylized lines, Proceedings of the 6th international symposium on Non-photorealistic animation and rendering, June 09-11, 2008, Annecy, France
	Kevin Myers , Louis Bavoil, Stencil routed A-Buffer, ACM SIGGRAPH 2007 sketches, August 05-09, 2007, San Diego, California
	Diego Nehab , Hugues Hoppe, Random-access rendering of general vector graphics, ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), v.27 n.5, December 2008
	Christian Lauterbach , Anish Chandak , Dinesh Manocha, Interactive sound rendering in complex and dynamic scenes using frustum tracing, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, v.13 n.6, p.1672-1679, November 2007
	Fang Liu , Meng-Cheng Huang , Xue-Hui Liu , En-Hua Wu, Efficient depth peeling via bucket sort, Proceedings of the Conference on High Performance Graphics 2009, August 01-03, 2009, New Orleans, Louisiana
	Konstantine Iourcha , Jason C. Yang , Andrew Pomianowski, A directionally adaptive edge anti-aliasing filter, Proceedings of the Conference on High Performance Graphics 2009, August 01-03, 2009, New Orleans, Louisiana
	Leif Kobbelt , Mario Botsch, A survey of point-based techniques in computer graphics, Computers and Graphics, v.28 n.6, p.801-814, December, 2004