ABSTRACT
The term vector textures refers to 2D surface patterns built from distinct shapes with crisp, generally curved boundaries between two regions: foreground and background. Many surface patterns in the real world look like this, for example printed and painted text, logos, and decals. Alpha masks for blending between two more complex surface appearances may also have crisp boundaries: bricks and mortar, water puddles on asphalt, cracks in paint or plaster, mud splatter on a car. For decades, real-time computer graphics has been long plagued by an inability to accurately render sharp surface features up close, as demonstrated in Figure 12.1. Magnification without interpolation creates jaggy, pixelated edges, and bilinear interpolation gives a blurry appearance. A common method for alpha masks is to perform thresholding after interpolation. This maintains a crisp edge, but it is wobbly and distorted, and the pixelated nature of the underlying data is apparent.
