Game Art Style Task

Q. What are, in your opinion, the notable milestones in the history of Artistic/Visual styles used in computer games?

The difference between
 8 bit and 16 bit

A. In my opinion I think the milestones are the advance in technology. Games such as the original Super Mario it used 8 bit which was a limitation but was also a style. Even games today copy this style because they want to even though they can do much more. I think just each jump in graphics from 8 bit to 16 bit and so on. The main milestones were advances in technology. This is because technology and artistic styles are related. There are some styles which are obviously an exception since some games stick to previous styles such as Minecraft. The style changes the way people play and think about a game. It can make them interested in a building and want to explore it or it can be simple colours depicting which way to go.

Nathan Drake from Uncharted

As i previously said, technology relates to style which then means polygon count. This is rapidly increasing in todays current AAA title games but isn't needed. An example is Mario. Back when the first mario game came out, the polygon count was probally below 1000 for the 3d model in Mario 64. Ask anyone, no matter who they are and nearly all will know who mario is. If you do this with a high polygon count game such as Nathan Drake from Uncharted on the Playstation 3. Only a select few will know who he is and this character has thouzands of polygons and 3d moddellers have spent months trying to perfect the model. Mario was dressed in defining clothes with blue overalls and a red hat. This was smart of Nintendo since its memorable whereas Nathan Drake is wearing some jeans and a baige shirt. This proves that the polygon count doesnt mean better. What matters is the style of the game which makes is success.

Mario 64

Notes From Video
gaming style - big topic - works at bestheda game studios and did concept art and character art for skyrim , he worked at ea before that at warhammer onlinbe, he started doin plugin player mlodels for quake 3 areana .Art style matters to gamers . Hard to make 16 pixel block to look like a person. Ganes are keen to get into realism , they think its a better game to make it realistic to make more immersion. take time to replicate atmespheric perspectrive , bloom , amibent occlusion , bounce lighting , dynamic vegetation to make it look like film which they have to recreate ingame . illistraqtion is greatest form of inspiration , drawn animation has problems of illistration. The players hand takes control over animator , eg player clicks punch button - the character move.to create art you have to think what will look good in the game engine and by the player. you have to look through the lenses of game art - modelling is silouette and shadow , they spend loads of times on the silouette . texturing is colour and detail  , in nes days they had colour limitations and limited colour pallettes. Detail - sine you cant use composite you use detail to do it , add less detail to things you dont want the player to notice or see. silouette and colour go together to give loads of character . Lighting is the same between game and other media by creating areas dark and light you can draw attrention , make contrast and draw the eye to where you want to . Shading is how surfaces react to light - atmosphere ,ambient occlusion make it feel more real , think about how surfaces react to light. Blend more procidual effects to add realness to animation. Exposure is new thin= development in game art where you create 3d camereas as real cameras . making 3d game is like building a 3d diarama and photo it. bloom is to give you a visual que or realisation eg looking in the sun hurts your eyes. Moonlight isnt blue the moon is grey and sun it orange and looks blue . All games have a style .

File extensions and file compression

File Extention
File extention is the file format of a certain file you save. You do this by putting a .*** at the end of your file name. This changes the type of file it gets saved as. Some examples are .png , .jpeg , .exe , .dmg and .txt. These file types are used for different things and you need to use a specific one depending on what your making it for. Some people use filename extentions to trick people into thinking its a harmless file where infact it contains a virus or malicous software.

File Compression
There are two different types of file compression which are "lossless" and "lossy". These are two ways to compress a file in different ways

Lossless
Lossless compression is a form of compression which you don't lose any information in the process. This has become more and more advanced as technology has. An example of this is when an image has area's of pixels the same colour, the data can be read as 100 blue pixels instead or blue pixel blue pixel.

Lossy
Lossy compression is the opposite to lossless as you lose data and quality whereas in lossless you don't. The benifit to lossy though is that the loss is acceptable. Depending on the file changes the amount of data can be lost with still able to have decent quality. An example of this is in JPEG images it works by rounding off the less important bits. In audio you use speech compression which is used for CD ripping.

Raster and vector images

Raster Images
Raster images are images which when you zoom in you can see each pixel. When you do this you then can get the colour value of each pixel using the red , green and blue scale. You can see it in this picture for example.Raster images usually use jpg , tiff , png ,psd and bmp file formats to save them to.

The problem with raster images is that the resolution is set. You cant scale it to a different size without a loss of quality. This is the complete opposite to vector images as they scale easily. They main use for raster images is photographs and photo-realistic images. Devices such as camera's and scanners produce a raster image since an image editor will work on pixels.


Vector Images
Vector images are mad up of paths and stokes. vector images are good because they keep their quality even if you zoom in. This is because vector images can be scaled to any size without loss of quality since raster are based on pixels and vector images arn't. The file formates vector images use though are normally wmf , psd , fla and ai.

Another advantage about vector images are that no matter what resolution the image is , it will always be the same file size which doesn't really matter any more since there's hard drives with terabytes of space now. For a vector image to be displayed or printed the device has to convert it into raster format before its able to render it.

Image Capture

In this modern day, most of our lives on digital and this means we need a way to capture images to put on a computer.This is called image capture and there are many different ways to do this ranging from camera's to capture devices.

Camera's
A camera works by recording images which can be transferred in different ways. They do this my by capturing the light with the lens with an aperture at one end for the light to enter. There used to be no way to get the image from the camera but it developed over the years.  When it used a film to store the pictures it was impossible still to put it onto a computer. Recently the pictures have started to be stored on flash memory which can be transferred to a computer and stored on a hard drive or flash memory. Since you can put the files on a computer , it makes it so you can edit them using various software such as photoshop. The default file extention is for images of this type is J-PEG.  As camera's get more advanced they will have more detailed pictures with more "megapixels" in addition to taking more frames in a still image.

There are various versions of camera's. Heres some of the more known ones.

Sony's Cyber-shot digital camera

• Camera Phone
• Digital Camera
• Movie Camera
• Pocket Camera
• Traffic Camera
• Video Camera

Scanners
Scanners are devices which can capture an image and transfere it onto a computer.It can scan images, printed text , drawings and objects. There are different types of scanners but the most common is CCD scanner. The different types just define the way it works. A CCD scanner is known as a flatbed scanner. This consists of a glass pane to put your picure on for example where under there is a light which lights up the picture. This light moves along the picture and using 2 mirrors, the capture device "scans" your picture and makes it a digital image.


Flatbed scanner

Diagram of CCD Scanner



Image Optimisation and storage

Image optimisation is when you make the image an appropriate size to fit a model. Textures need to use the power of two rule. If you don't scale the image to a power of two then the image won't fit properly and be missing.If you don’t optimize textures then the game has to reposition the textures to make them fit which makes them go out of line and blury.

If you don’t use the power of two rule then then engine has to reposition and expand the texture to make it fit. This means the engine has to do more processes which in turn will slow down the game and lower the fps. It lowers the fps because the processing power needs to be used for a lot of other things.Interpolation is when there is extra data needed to fill in the gaps so it makes up extra pixels and that’s where the blurring comes from – filling in the missing data. Loss-less compression is where you save a file which will increase the file size to compress it better. This means it won’t resize the image but will increase the file size. A file format such as JPEG is a file format described as lossy. All game engines don’t physically resize textures but some do such as the unity game engine.

Pixels and image resolution

Pixels
Pixels per inch or pixel density. The word pixel comes from picture and element. A pixel is the smallest thing in a digital image. We create pixels using different software such as photoshop or paint. It can be presented on a television such as a LCD screen. Pictures can be took using a camera or a scanner and it contains pixels. Digital images are always rectangles or squares. They are constructed of pixels. There's a horizontal and vertical number of pixel size of an image. A million pixels is called a megapixel. E.g 1920 x1080 has 2,073,600 pixels which is 2.07 megapixels.There are two types of images which is screen and print. Screen is the pixels on the monitor and the resolution is 72ppi (pixels per inch). A print is a image which is printed off and has 300dpi (dots per inch) which is basically the same thing. When people are making games for phones they have to consider the ppi of the phone. Such as the iPhone 3gs has 165ppi.

Image Resolution
The image resolution is a term that descrives the detail the image hold. This term applist to digital images , film images and other type of images. The resolution can be lines per mm (LP/mm) or lines per inch (LP/Inch). A resolution can consist of loads of different amount of pixels. For example HD us 1280x720 pixels. Whereas full HD is either 1440x1080 or 1920x1080 depending of the input.

Bit is conflation of 2 words - Binary and digit. Origin of the word is attributed to John W Tukey who first written on Bell Labs memo on 9th of January 1947 in contracted "binary digit" to simplify "bit"

In computing a bit can only have 2 possible values 0 or 1 , yes or no , true or false , + or - etc.

A byte is a group of 8 bits. Bytes or multiples thereof, are almost always used to speicfy the sizes of computing files and the capacity of storage uinits. Most modern compiter and peripheral devices are designed to manipulate data whole bytes or groups of bytes rather than individual bits.A nibble is 4 bits or half a byte. 2 to the power of 8 is 256 bits. Bit depth specifies how much each pixel is an image. The more bits of information per pixel , the more available colours and more accuraate colour representaion.

An image with 1 pixel has 2 values black and white. An image with a bit depth of 8 has 2(8) or 256 possible values grayscale mode images with bit depth of 8 have 256 possibe gray values.

RGB images ae made of three colour channels. An 8 bit per pixel RGB image has 256 possible values fir each channel which means it has over 16 million pissible colour values. RGB images with 8 bits per channel (bpc) are sometimes called 24 bit images (8 bits x 3 channels = 24 bits of date for each pixel).

Applications of digital graphics for computer games

Different Types of Applications

Call of Duty billboard

• Advertisments
• Text
• Banners/billboards
• Backlits
• Posters
• Rack cards
• Business Cards
• Magnets
• Pole Banners
• Trailers

Companies use many type of digital applications to make digital graphics in computer games. Things such as bitmap is a form of image. A bitmap is an image downsampled from a vector image.It can be different types such as GDI , ILBM , PBM , XBM , WBMP , ,JPEG , TIFF , PNG and GIF. These formats are all different and are used by different applications in computer games.

They use digital graphics in advertising games in the examples above. The most common one is trailers which are usually online , tv , film and adverts. They grab the most attention as they usually contain information about what the game is about and what graphics to expect from it.

Forms of digital graphics in computer games

• Characters - Put textures over the 3d models to make them look differently.I can disginush facial features and body parts.
• Guns - Put textures on guns to make a gun look differently. This can help someone see what gun it is so they know what gun to use. This is important so it looks like its meant to and not a random object.
• Environment - Put textures on the environment to make it look better. The textures on trees , buildings , paths , backgrounds etc. Without this levels will look bland and boring. They need to look good so people enjoy looking at them and want to play the game.
• Buildings - The look of buildings are important because they need variation. One building repeated over is boring to look at and around. The graphics also makes it look damages , derelict etc. This adds depth and story to each specific building. It can also help a goal e.g go to the red builing or chaple. The look of it will help the player find it easier.
• Bullets - The textures on the bullets is important if slo-mo is in the game so you can see bullets flying through the air. Also bullets on the floor when shooting so it looks realistic.
• Items - The graphics on items is important is so the player knows what their picking up such as health pack or armor etc. Without this the player could be picking up any item. The graphics also need to be clear and easy to read in tough situations.
• Explosions - The explosion graphics is important as they need to be big and bright. Without a graphic it would just be boring. They can be used on an explosive barrel or a rocket launcher.
• Animations - The animation graphic is one of the most important in the game because without it , the character won't look like its moving for example. This needs to be separate for each character object etc. 
• Packaging
• Writing

Streetfighter IV - A game which mixes
together 2d and 3d 

The Main Forms Of Digital Graphics in computer games are

• 3d

Fixed 3d , First-person perspective and third-person perspective

• 2d

Parallel projection, top-down perspective ,side-scrolling game and 2.5D (3/4 perspective)

They use textures on 3d models and that what makes up the visuals. Over the years the resolution and pixels of the texture have changed. The use of the graphics in games is very important as without it the game wouldn't be as appealing or interesting to play.