ANISOTROPIC TEXTURE MAPPING USING SILHOUETTE/FOOTPRINT ANALYSIS IN A COMPUTER IMAGE GENERATION SYSTEM

Anisotropically mapping of texture information to each pixel required for display of each of plural polygons forming each scene on a CIG display in a computational efficient manner, uses the footprint of each transformed pixel silhouette, as mapped from image space into the texture array, to determine an anisotropic texture space area having both a related length and a related width, in which complete texels and texels fractions are covered by that pixel footprint. A set of un-normalized line equations characterizing a particular pixel footprint is used to determine whether each texel or subtexel in the vicinity of that pixel footprint is either enclosed or avoided by (i.e. inside or outside of) that projected pixel footprint.