Unit46 LO1

Types of digital capture and digital image types.

Ways to image capture and why people use each. Digital cameras and photo scanners are the main ways of image capture and generally you would use a photo scanner to try and copy a real life drawing or photo to digital this can be for many reasons including for easier use as reference when 3d modeling so you can zoom in on certain details or to move the image into a photo editing program to do things like remaster it in higher resolution or to experiment with to try new things without messing with the original there are cons to this though as scans dont always look as good as the real thing but can still be handy in the ways i've described.

Epson (2017) https://epson.com/For-Home/Scanners/Photo-Scanners/Epson-Perfection-V600-Photo-Scanner/p/B11B198011(2/11/17

Digital Cameras

Meanwhile digital cameras are by far the most common way of image capture coming in all sorts of shapes sizes and pupuse from cheap £20 holiday cameras which don't do great photos but good for the price to cameras on mobile phones to the latest and greatest high end cameras going into the £1000s and there is many ways these can and will be used from snapping photos of people and animals to landscapes to using camera photos for textures or for architecture where you use a digital CAD model of a building and photoshopping it in to a photo to give a idea on how the building will look.

They can be used for analysing data by capturing things the human eye may miss good example of this is the famous running horse photos which were used to figure out how they ran. In games development the main ways they are used is for textures for scouting places and environments to aid with modeling and a technology which is being used more and more called photogrammetry which can be used to create 3d models from photos by taking sometimes 100s to 1000s of photos of buildings people objects etc from different angles and importing them into a package like Autodesk recap 360 which turns of the photos into models.

example of me doing some experiments with Autodesk Recap 360.

In games development its best to use as high resolution photos as possible to all the detail you can though when texturing is best to lower the resolution so you don't have too many high res textures as this will use a lot more VRAM on your GPU Graphics Processing Unit. there are 2 main types of digital graphics in modern computing this may teh first is bitmap images which is the most common type and are used for most final works for textures etc and are normally saved in formats like PNG JPEG etc this images are a set image size so for example 1000 pixels by 1000 pixels this is fine for down-scaling as there is not too many problems but does not scale up well at all normally making it pixelated. The 2nd type is vector image this is the type software like Photoshop use and the main file types you see these in are things like .pdf and .ai. Vector images give you the best quality and infinite scalability with no pixelation and can be easily exported as a bitmap image for use in other applications once finished. While vector is superior in many ways and there files take less space they are far more demanding on hardware to posses hence why they are not used as video game textures.

The main files types for images are JPEG this is a medium quality file format which is good for web images. However using JPEG will degrade the image if edited too much.There is PNG which is similar to JPEG but is a higher quality format for saving photos but comes at the cost of files sizes being larger. There is GIF for web animation. TIFF is a Lossless image format for the highest quality image however not all photo viewers can read all tiff files. File types like EPS,PSD and AI are used for editing files in progress in say photoshop or illustrator but are also extremely good for printing. And PDF if again great for printing and for web documents.

Sources Emilio Di Pietro. (2017) U46 2D Digital Graphics for Computer Games (HNC).http://emiliodipietro4.wixsite.com/showreel/single-post/2013/05/01/This-is-the-title-of-your-first-blog-post (2/11/17) and Wikipedia (26th October 2017) Image file formats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_file_formats (2/11/17)

The use of digital graphics in video games.

There are mainly uses for digital 2d graphics in video games from 2d games to 3dgames textures and there are many styles and ways to do this. The main use in 3dgames is for texturing objects and makings things like sky boxes and menus and HUDS.

when creating 3d models you nomaly want to texture them so you make uv maps of them model and import that into photo editing software like photoshop. You can also create textures for 2d and 3d games by making 3d models and burning the 3d model into a 2d texture this is a good way of making 3d looking brick walls etc while keeping it 2d and less demanding.

This is a brick texture i made recently for practice the other week.

One thing you must always take into account is making sure you dont make your files too big or too demanding on the final product it is useful to compress files when saving to cut down on files sizes or save them in a lower resolution otherwise your game will be extremely demanding on pc hardware for no good reason.

Video game developers also use 2d digital graphics editing programs like photoshop with drawing tablets or just there mouse and keyboard to draw concept art of games instead or in conjunction with hand drawn physical artwork this can be extremely handy as mentioned earlier for editing and making changes without destroying the original copy so you can try different styles or correct mistakes etc.

Some art styles used for digital graphics in video games

Photo realism

Firstly there is photo realism this style when it comes to 2d is mainly for texture work and for the concept art of photo realistic 3d video games. This style has a long history however photo realism is less of a style and more a goal as its has been nearly impossible to recreate photo realistic graphics in video games so the style more reference to games that try to aim for this without exaggeration reality this is often seen in simulator games or “walkingsimulators” as the genre of story based game with little playing input have become know like the game Everybody's Gone to the Rapture which tries to accurately recreate a British village to immerse the player in the game world.

Stylised realism

Stylised realism this is one of the most common styles of games in the modern aaa scene from GTA 5 to Forza 7 to Battlefield these are hyper detailed games which aim for realism in many ways but will try and make the game look more appealing by having over exaggerated colours and post processing effects while still looking somewhat photo real in some ways. This style helps devs get over the problems of modern tech when trying to create realistic looking games as even the most powerful cpus and gpus struggle to do full Photo realism plus the style is made the make games look more like modern movies with colour palette and mood etc.

Retro/pixelart

Pixelart aka retro is a common art style used by indie devs when recreating the feel of games of their childhood and used for nostalgia when done right this can be a very charming art style when mixed with the better colour palette modern computers can handle compared to back in the days of the sega mega drive and nintendo entertainment system so can be a great mix of old and new. This is mostly used in 2d games but there has been 3d games using this artstyle in the past.

Cartoon

Cartoon art style is a art style which is used to make things look like cartoon tv shows films and art work and is often mixed with lighting techniques like cel-shading. Some games even use hand drawn assets like with cuphead which was trying to recreate the look and feel of 1920s and 1930s cartoons by recreating both the artstyle and animation style and implementing it in games.

3D Animation

3D animation art style also known as cartoony however is very different from what i mentioned above. This art style looks alot more like 3d animated films from people like pixar in style and has been around since the very early days of mainstream 3d gaming with games like super mario 64 for the nintendo 64 and crash bandicoot for the playstation 1. This art style is mainly used on 3d platformers and has a wide range of implementations from the simplicity of mario to the rich detail of the reboot of ratchet and clank for the ps4. This art style is common to see bright colors with simplistic models. This art style evolved from the 2d pixel art on platformer from the 1980s to the early 1990s and shares a lot of similarities with its pixelart cousin and can be found in a very wide range of games these days including 2d platformers using 3d assets to this year's big hit Free to play battle royal game Fortnite. There is also games that are fully 2d which look somewhat similar to this general art style.

Conclusion of video game art styles

This is just a selection of some of the biggest art styles most commonly used in the modern video game industry there are many many more some more niche than others and there is a lot of crossover between styles like anime which can been seen as a stylised offshoot of the Cartoon art style trying to imitate the style and feel of Japanese cartoons films and other media. And if i went through each individual art style this may go into the 10,000s of words.