ABSTRACT
Nowadays, rendering high-quality antialiased lines is still not a trivial task. Graphics APIs like Direct3D or OpenGL allow the programmer to render basic 2D/3D lines with a limited width. However, those lines are not properly antialiased on all hardware [Lorach 05], and there is no perspective effect, i.e., a line always has the same size on the screen whatever its distance to the viewer. Furthermore, they lack of an overall volumetric look. McNanmara [McNamara et al. 00] and Chan [Chan and Durand 05] have proposed methods to render antialiased lines, but they do not feature any perspective effect. Cozzi [Cozzi and Ring 11] proposed a geometry shader extruding quads from 3D lines in screen space for high-quality antialiased lines without any perspective effect. Lorach [Lorach 05] has proposed to render volumetric antialiased lines by using an extended quad in screen space using a vertex shader. Line
appearance is represented by 16 texture tiles that were interpolated based on the camera position as compared to the line direction. However, the trick used is still noticeable when viewing a line along its direction.
