High-quality polygon edging

Applications combining wireframe and shaded primitives often produce unwanted artifacts and thus poor-quality polygon edging. We have developed an algorithm that uses an edging plane to generate clean, high-quality polygon edges when using separately drawn vectors to highlight polygon borders. The algorithm maintains the subpixel adjustments necessary for accurate polygonal rendering. The edging plane is simple to incorporate into existing software and hardware scan convertors. In this article, we describe the problem of edging a single polygon, then extend the discussion to multipolygon surfaces and multiple component assemblies. We introduce our algorithm and compare it to existing methods for improving polygon edges.