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The nature of the pixel

Blog Intermediate

Jan Mróz

Proposed by Jan Mróz

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Description

Jan Mróz's March 2026 Procedural Pixels deep dive explains why many rendering artifacts come from sampling a discrete pixel grid rather than from lighting models alone.

It connects fragment evaluation at pixel centers to hard-edged analytical shapes, multi-sample coverage, signed-distance antialiasing with fwidth, bilinear and mipmapped texture filtering, anisotropic filtering at grazing angles, raymarching LOD artifacts, temporal antialiasing blur, and a Unity UI icon case study with mipmap bias and pixel snapping.

Intermediate tech artists and shader authors who know basic HLSL but struggle with shimmer, blur, or asymmetrical UI icons are the core audience.

The article is one long structured essay with Shadertoy demonstrations and an Iñigo Quilez distance-function reference, free on the blog.

It gives a unified mental model for fighting aliasing that Procedural Pixels readers often cite alongside other discrete-sampling posts on the same site.