Rendering anti-aliased line segments

Bridging the modeling and rendering gap between the existing triangle and point primitives, we explore the use of line segments as a new primitive to represent and render 3D models. Our main contribution extends the anti-aliasing theory in texture mapping to anti-aliased line segment rendering, and presents an approximation algorithm to render high quality anti-aliased opaque and transparent line segments in 3D models. This antialiasing technique is empirically validated by building a software pipeline to render models of any combination of the three types of modeling primitives: triangles, line segments and points. Our experiment shows that models comprising line segments are generally more efficient and effective for high quality rendering as compared to their corresponding pure point models.