Art Blog
Digital graphics in computer games are used for a number of different ways. I will firstly be talking about the different types of game art, formats and technology used by artists in the game industry.
Concept art is an illustration where it shows a design or idea shown in a certain mood before it is put out as the final product. Concept art is a visual development that is an illustrated image. The purpose of concept art is to show an idea or theme through an illustrated image which is then developed on. A concept artist has to be able to draw and paint.
Texture art is 2D image wrapped around a 3D model usually to give it colour. Textures are usually patterns of colours. The purpose of the textures is to add colour to 3D models to give it more character. The purpose of the textures is to add colour to 3D models to give it more character and make it more realistic. Photoshop and UV mapping are used to produce texture art.
The pixels in an image are individual colours to make up a picture they can also be called colour values. The image resolution is how many pixels are in an image. It is shown by the width x height of the image. E.g. a full HD image is 1920 x 1080p.
Types of digital graphics
Raster Images
BMP
A BMP (Bitmap) an image file that stores a colour value for every pixel meaning it’s a larger size. It is a high quality image file that doesn’t use any compression at all meaning that it saves as a large file size. Bitmap images are only really used by Microsoft/Microsoft Paint.
GIF
GIF images (graphics interchange format) are good for drawings/line art and are pretty good image file sizes but they are not so good for photos as the maximum amount of colours available in an image is 256 which is quite small. GIF’s are also a lossless format.
TIFF
Tiff images are always high quality and can also store a lot of information along with the image. As tiff’s are high quality and store a lot of info it makes the file size bigger . Tiff’s usually use a lossless format.
Jpeg (Jay-Peg)
Jpeg’s are probably the most common file type. Jpeg’s use a lossy compression technique. They are good for saving something that you want to work on again. It can use different amounts of compression. The more Jpeg’s are compressed the smaller the file size will be but the poorer the image quality will be. It also uses compression to reduce file size.
Vector Images
PSD
PSD files (Photoshop) are very high quality and very large image files. They have lossless compression and can store a lot of information with the image file such as layers, masks and transparency.
These two vector formats, .ai (Adobe Illustrator) and eps (Encapsulated Postscript) are both small files and both files with instructions on how to recreate the file.
Compression
Lossy vs. Lossless
The advantage of lossy methods over lossless methods is that in some cases a lossy method can produce a much smaller compressed file than any lossless method, while still meeting the requirements of the application.
File Sizes
Image file sizes are usually expressed by the number of bytes then increases with the number of pixels composing an image and the colour depth of the pixels. The greater the number of rows and columns, the greater the image resolution, and the larger the file.
Graphical Styles
We can tell that these two games are the same genre (First Person Shooter) as they both using very dark colours contrasting with brighter colours. The Battlefield 3 cover uses a slight bit of the colour orange maybe this could represent danger (fire) making the seem more action based. Whereas the Modern Warfare 3 image has used a silhouette of a soldier against a light background which as an audience we immediately focus on the soldier wielding a weapon. So the contrast with the light and dark colours gives the cover more action.
Colour perception is based on the way you feel when you see something due to the colour of something.
