Digital Graphics for Computer Games

These days a lot of time and effort goes into the creation of game graphics and assets in some of your favourite games. Game graphics of the 21st have come a long way in the past 20 years and can now be a driving force behind a players gaming experience. Art style and graphics can invoke emotions that leave a lasting imprint on the player. We will delve into the world of art within computer games including applications of digital graphics, art style, and practical skills.

Art Style

There are many types of art styles used in computer games these days. Each art style will try to convey something different to the player. Art styles include photorealism, cel-shading, abstraction and pixel art.

The last of us is a perfect example of photorealism. Photorealism encompasses graphic mediums where something is created to look as realistic as possible. In the gaming world this is often used in military first person games, or in dramatic

story driven games such as the last of us. Photorealism is used to immerse a player within a game world and invoke certain emotions to the player. The technology behind photorealism within games has come a long way especially in the wake of next gen and the unreal 4 engine but it has never quite been perfected in the gaming world yet.

Cel-Shading is a rendering process designed to make a 3D asset more two dimensional. The idea is to make the asset look hand drawn with almost comic like features. This style is often used in games that are less serious and more fantasy based. Cel-shading has two defining characteristics, these are the Strong black outline often at the edges of a model to simulate drawing lines, and block shading whereby the colours within shadow don’t blend together. The first commercial release of a game featuring cel-shaded graphics was Jet Set Radio released in 2000, so this technique is still fairly new to the gaming world.

Abstraction is a fairly simple art style that uses lines, shapes and often vibrantly contrasting colours that don’t really resemble anything in the real world. A lot of early games employed abstraction as a style due to the rudimentary way in which computer graphics were rendered.

Pixel art is a 2D art style created using image manipulation software on a pixel by pixel basis. Assets creating using this style are called sprites. Pixel art came about because of early hardware limitations. Back in the early days of computer games there were no super computers that could render in 3D. Pixel art was the best solution for how to create something simply that would convey enough detail for the player to understand.

Digital Graphics and Applications in Gaming

Digital Graphics have many applications within the gaming world. Just a few examples are texturing, background art, interface graphics, concept art and print media. All of these are vital to the creation of computer games from the creation of the game itself to how a game is marketed to the public.

Texture mapping is a graphics design process where a 2d image is applied to a 3d object to make that object more realistic. It is a way to give a featureless shape some form of presence. A texture consists of a 2d image that occupies a coordinate defined by how wide or high the texture is. These coordinates are called U and V where U is the width and V is the height this is called UV mapping. The mesh of the 3D objected is flattened (UV) for the 2D image to be laid on top of.

By Thomas Clayton

Concept art is vital to a games conception. Concept art in video games are drawings, paintings, or illustrations that are used to visually convey an idea to the games design team. Artists can be creative when it comes to concept art but must also think about how it could be created in the final product.

Interface Graphics are in games to allow the user to interact with a game. The interface of a game is vital to how a game is played, these vary from the opening menus of the game, to something like crafting tools in minecraft. It is very important that these interface graphics are easy to use, aestheticaly pleasing and fit in with the overall style of the game. Take minecraft for example here, everything is very easy to understand and labelled correctly it’s a very simple design fitting in with the ethos of the game.

Print media is one of the most important applications of digital graphics in the gaming world. This is the physical representation of the game to the audience. This encompasses anything from advertising posters to the box art you would see upon a game purchase. It is important because other than watching videos online this is how the buyer will perceive the game, this is how the game draws your attention.

Graphic Types, Picture Element and Image Resolution

A raster graphic is a digital image created by a grid of points often referred to as pixels (Picture Elements). These raster graphics are often hard to manipulate without a loss of information and are stored in a variety of different formats such as Jpegs, BMPs, TIFFs, and GIFs.

Raster based graphics are dependent on the resolution of the image. Resolution is the measurement of how many dots there are per inch of the image, the higher this number the more detail there is in the image. There are also vector based graphics that differ from raster based images.

Vector based graphics are different to raster graphics as they don’t lose quality or information when blown up. Vectors use paths, points and curves which are based on mathematical equations to represent an image. The image above shows how vectors and raster based images differ when viewed close up.

When it comes to digital graphic file formats there are loads to choose from. It is important that you choose the correct one because each of them do very different things to your image. The most common raster based formats are Jpeg, TIF, GIF, PNG and RAW.

Digital cameras and web pages usually use JPEG files. JPEGs Compress data so that the file is much smaller. A Jpeg uses lossy compression to do this but there are disadvantages to using this type of compression. Lossy compression is where a part of the file is permanently eliminated this is usually the redundant information so the image is still recognisable. This will reduce the quality of the image so it is important this format is not used in production quality images.

TIF can be both lossy and lossless. Lossless compression is where no data is lost when compressed. When compressed in this way small details are removed and added back to the file when it is opened.

GIF uses lossless compression but has poor colour options. It is more commonly used for animation on the internet.

PNG is very similar to GIF but offers transparency options to the image. This property makes it useful when it comes to texturing in video games.

RAW is a lossless format. RAW is not directly usable as an image without the use of software such as Adobe Photoshop to convert them to another format.

File extensions and file compression

There are many ways to capture images for use in video games and has many uses within the video games industry. The most common way images are captured for use in video games is photography. Photography is used for a variety of different purposes such as texturing, location scouting and concept art. An extension of this would be Mo-cap. Mo-cap is the process of using actors to record motion within video games or even film. Mo-cap is good for making animations more human like and add an immersive dimension to video games.

Image Capture