Figure 12.

Antialiasing object edges. (A) The dark edges of a small portion of the retinol-binding protein from Figure 1 display a marked alias (jagged edge) effect if nothing special is done to smooth out the edges. (B) Same as A, except that the dark edges have been partially smoothed by using the Antialiasing panel of the ProteinShader GUI to select an option to antialias the black edges of halftoning images by using translucent black silhouettes to add gray pixels to the edges (see Antialiasing section of text). (C) Same as (B), except that the Antialiasing panel has been used to select an option to perform additional antialiasing by jittering the entire scene 3 times and blending the images. Each jittered image is offset by a fraction of a pixel from the original image. (D) Same as (C), except that the scene is jittered 6 times. (E) The performance costs for antialiasing are measured by comparing frames per second during a constant rotation. See Table 3 for the sizes of the test proteins and notes on the computer used for performance testing. The items in the graph legend are presented in the same order as (A) through (D). The images were generated on a monitor with a 72 pixels per inch resolution, where the alias effect in (A) is quite obvious. Because of the dramatic slowdown in rendering time, antialiasing is primarily intended for saving static images, not for animations.