Antialiasing and its Side Effects

Introduction
In the 3D world, render engines use a process known as SuperSampling to improve the quality of rendered output by decreasing the effect of aliasing. Aliasing is a term to describe imperfections in the rendering process caused by color changes that are too drastic, and that occur over too small an area of screen space to be adequately depicted by the pixels that define that space. In a single still image, aliasing is certainly noticeable and can reduce realism, but if the same scene is set in motion, the results can be downright distracting and can ruin what would otherwise be a great animation. Two examples of these antialiasing side effects are flickering and texture crawling. The following discussion explains this problem further and discusses a unique and effective way of reducing these unwanted effects for any animation. The results are sure to amaze.

Flickering
Flickering occurs during animations when materials, such as the grass shown below, have a speckled appearance with drastic changes in color occurring over a small number of pixels. In these cases, the computer cannot accurately determine which color to assign a given pixel, because the edge of two colors exists in the middle of a pixel. In the left image below, supersampling is disabled, and the contrast in adjacent pixels is harsher than in the right image, in which supersampling is enabled. When scenes with these textures are animated, the difference between the two can be dramatic.

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