This reminded me a lot of what I'd been doing for years but didn't realize until now in Minecraft. (For anyone unfamiliar with the game, Minecraft is a really cool survival/building game where most things in the world are cubes with different textures.) A lot of times, you might want to make a cylindrical building, for example, but when there's nothing round in the game, you have to approximate a circle, placing blocks something like this: http://i.imgur.com/2vKcn.png. Notice that the larger the radius of the circle, the better approximated the circle becomes. This is a lot like increasing the resolution of an image to improve its likeness to its contents.
kevhcha
Are shapes other than triangles ever used in rasterization? Such as when resolution isn't as big of a concern?
This reminded me a lot of what I'd been doing for years but didn't realize until now in Minecraft. (For anyone unfamiliar with the game, Minecraft is a really cool survival/building game where most things in the world are cubes with different textures.) A lot of times, you might want to make a cylindrical building, for example, but when there's nothing round in the game, you have to approximate a circle, placing blocks something like this: http://i.imgur.com/2vKcn.png. Notice that the larger the radius of the circle, the better approximated the circle becomes. This is a lot like increasing the resolution of an image to improve its likeness to its contents.
Are shapes other than triangles ever used in rasterization? Such as when resolution isn't as big of a concern?