2D and 3D Research

UNIT 78

digital graphics

Artistic styles

Cell-shading -Cell-shading is used to represent the style of cartoon or comic book and is used in a lot of Japanese's games e.g. Naruto, dragonballz, Afro samurai and others. Bright colors and faint outlines to give the look of a hand drawn cartoon effect.   

Photo realism - Photo realism games are games that are made to look as realistic as they can, this type of style is the most demanding as it takes a lot of work, facilitates and time to produce a game of this type. Crisis 3, The C.O.D franchise and battlefield franchise use this visual style and are military type games.

Exaggerated -Exaggerated uses photorealism and exaggerates it or over does it like in takken or dragon ball z where the characters have over sized muscles and big outrageous hair styles.

Abstract -Abstract uses geometric shapes and bright or subtle colour depending on the mood and feeling the game wants the player to feel. Geometry wars uses lots of vibrant neon colours and works at a fast pace.

Military-Military games such as battlefield and call of duty use military theme visuals to give the player the feeling of being in a real battlefield/war zone. Lots of detail go into the weaponry and vehicles to make them look as real as possible, in battle field you can change entire terrines with rockets and other weapons

Plastic-Plastic games such as de blob uses vibrant paint based colours with lots of shading a light effects to make objects and characters look like plastic.

Black and white -Black and white games on uses black and white colours they types of games that uses just black and white are most platform. This is used to give games a horror feel.

Rockstar-Rockstar the game development have there one style of games as they uses the rage engine developed by Rockstar. Rockstar games are violent and gritty. GTA5 and max pain are good examples as they are different genres but look similar because they both use the rage engine.

Computer games graphics

A 2 dimension game is flat on the screen or monitor and player is limited to moving left, right, up and down, the player cannot move front or back. 2D sprites can be made in Photoshop and are fairly easy to make they are made up of pixels and depending on how many pixel make up the character the smoother and more detailed they can be. A 3 Dimension game are more time consuming and harder to make however the results and the graphics are far superior to 2d. 3d characters can be made in a number of software like blender. Depending on how detailed you want your character the more time it will take. Heads up display or HUD is used in lot of games, a HUD shows the player all the stats on screen that may prove relevant for him/her e.g. heath, shield, ammo, level, map, objectives and other players.

Texture are used to add detail and realism to the environment , objects or characters and are one of he most import steps in game development. Texture mapping is an application in digital graphics. Text graphics is the font and style the text is used in the game. Different fonts and colors can change the way text and objectives look. Game packaging textures are how the packaging and case for the game looks, this is useful for advertisement and appeal to increase sales.

Raster and Vector images

Raster images are made up of pixels and also know as bitmap images and Vector images are made up of paths and are also called esp files. Vector images use points / paths and create an image when all of these are connected together. Vector images offer higher resolution and look smoother and cleaner at all resolutions. Raster images look better at larger resolution compared to lower resolutions, but if the raster image is zoomed in its is easy to see individual pixels and colours in the images. Vector images are better suited for images like logos because at any size or resolution the image is smooth and clean. Raster images are used for digital photos and game textures as they render faster and look good. Lots of software allows for images to be edited, Photoshop is is used a lot to edit, change images from vector to to raster and the other way around.

Image capture

There are lots of different types of image capture, from taking a picture with a phone or digital camera downloading a picture or image of the internet or scanning a image into a computer. In game development being able to have a real life picture of a building or object can be useful for development. Picture of buildings and landscapes can be used to design environments for the game you are developing. Using usb cables and sd cards from digital cameras and phones makes transferring images easy and quick. Pictures like brick walls or plaster can be used to add texture to buildings and environment in your game by overlaying the image over the image of the object or building, this adds realistic detail and texture.

file extension and File compression

Examples of file extension:

mp3 music files

avi video files

txt text files

doc word document (Microsoft word-open office )

jpeg image/picture files

exe executable (programs)

wav sound files (sound effects)

File compression is a process that reduces file sizes to save hard drive and memory space. Zipped folder is a common way of compressing files and data. The file extensions for zipped is .zip, it is commonly used to upload files online for other people to download because it keeps the file small to make it easy and fast to download. Specific software Is need to open specific file extensions, a .gmk is a file that can be opened in game maker but would be able to open in the same form in a different program.

There are two types of file compression. Lossless file compression is used for image and text files, this is useful to save file space and no data is lost. However when lossy file compression is used, data can be lost. Extraction is used to uncompressed compressed files, this is used to convert the file back to its original size. Using compressed files limits what you can do, so uncompressing  the image to its original size is handy.

Pixels and image resolutions

Resolution on a screen or monitor is determined by how dense the pixels are on the screen or image.The typical resolution for a computer monitor would have 72 PPI (pixels per inch and printed images usally have around 300 PPI. In game development the resolution and pixel density is import depending on what devices or consoles the game is going to be played on. Binary digit (Bits) is used as basic unit of information in computing and telecommunication. Bytes are a group of 8 bits.

Optimizing and storage

Image optimization is when an image is compressed to the most visually acceptable image for saving memory.The power of two is when the width and height of a image is at the same value.These values are import to make sure when 3D modeling textures fit and render properly. When the size of a texture is stretched to fit a model by the program this is called interpolation.