Hard to find many hits on this with a web search. So thought I’d ask the experts here.
What’s the latest in-vogue methods to antialias small (distant) light sources? Specifically, when the area illuminated by light sources subtends gets down to ~1 pixel.
Example: Envision a night scene with a street light shining down onto the ground below. You’re on the ground (or airborne) above the street light looking toward the horizon, and you back away from the light and the bright area of the ground it’s illuminating until the circular pool of light under the lamp only subtends 1-2 pixels. Now of course we get lots of aliasing (flickering), whether using light sources or light maps to add in the lighting. It’s bright enough that it aliases/swims badly, but not bright enough to bloom effectively. In fact, the area subtended by the illuminated ground sliver under the light source may not have even hit a pixel/sample.
Of course we can just throw more samples at it, but that’s not free. Any work out there on analytically computing a pixel coverage percentage based on depth samples? (this is deferred) Any other pointers to papers/presentations?
Thanks.