Visual Styles in Games

Unit 78

This week’s edition we will be reviewing various games which utilise numerous graphics and focusing on gaming realism. We will look at the visual artistic styles and their effects; we will review photorealism, cel-shading, abstraction, exaggeration, eg anime and manga. And the various types of digital types of Graphics

Photorealism:-

Grand Theft Auto is a good example when talking about realistic photo graphics as it is based within a real and existing city of New York. We know this because there are iconic landmarks like the Empire state building and the Statue of Liberty. However, the name of the city is rebranded as Liberty City. The city environment is vibrant and lively from the pedestrians to the city sky line. The game is made to be realistic as you hardly see the same pedestrians twice as you are exploring the city and even the weather forecast changes as you play throughout the game.

Further realistic effects are added through the use of texture which is developed in the game process. For example, game designers use a process by where they take a photo of the object and in print it on to the soft wear they may use. For explain the type of cars used with in the game are from an actual car within the real world.

Cel-shading:-

Naruto ninja storm 3 utilises cel-shading to replica mange comic book art style and Japanese style graphics which uses Hard edged cel shading in a coloring style mainly used for animation, such as Naruto, Naruto Shippuden and bleach mange cartoon chapters .With hard edged cel shading, it is easier for a graphic game designer to manipulate the shadows in different frames and move parts of the body without completely destroying the original light source.

Abstraction:-

Abstract games graphic is mainly used in arcade games which use shapes and bright colours. A great example of a game which uses abstract graphics is ‘Geometry Wars’ as it used shapes like demands and triangle in replacement of E and bright colour such as red, blue and green. The main difference with abstract graphics is that the objects used are not meant to look like anything that exists or that is known to us. Most games that use this style of graphics mainly have no real purpose to the game.

Another example of a game that uses abstract graphics is ‘Flow’. This utilises circle shapes and also marine life inspiration to create new type of fish. The game is relaxed and the type of colour used in the graphic is peaceful and calm.

Exaggeration:-

Exaggeration game graphics uses different emotions like sad, happy and excited. It exaggerates them an example of this is seem in Tekken were the facial features are not to proportion and the size of their body are not realistic. The whole body of the characters and the ability that they have does not match the size and weight of the overall characters. For example the character’s Bob in Taken has the ability to move fast even Hough the mass of his weight should be dragging him down.

However, the inspiration for the graphics comes from existing objects. The main element that is exaggerated is the hair and the weapons used in Final Fantasy which is way out of proportion to the character holding it and also using it in battle. Other games that utilise exaggerated game graphics like Blue Dragon which is mainly produced by Japanese game developers.

Types of digital graphics

Raster:

A raster image is an image format in which the individual dots which are called pixels are stored: their position, color, intensity, etc. is stored in the file. Each flat dot can be a different color in your picture however there is a disadvantage to this which is that you can’t minimize or enlarge the image this make the resolution quality decrease. When you look at the dots from far away, they blend together and produce beautiful images, but when you zoom in, you can see the pixels. Raster image may be inferior; however they actually have specific uses that make them better than vector images

Vector:

A vector image stores shapes based on mathematical formulas, such as circles and Bezier-curves meaning that image will be smooth and not have hard edges. Vector image can be scaled without losing information while in raster images you make simply pixels bigger making the image look uneven and hard edged. Vector images are made up of lines and points with information attached to them. For example: If you were to draw a circle, the drawing would be made up of a line with a curve of 360 degrees, a beginning and end point, with a specific size. An outline colour for the line, and the “fill”, or the color inside the line. The reason why vector is popular in the graphic industry and printing companies is because they can be easily made larger or smaller without losing any image quality. When you change the size of the image, the software simply redraws the design in the new size.

GIF

Graphic Interchange Format (GIF) is good for graphic art or screen captures or line art, GIF is used for images on the web. Images like a company logo or screen shots of a dialog box needed to be reduced to 16 colours if possible and saved as a GIF for smallest size making it easy to put in on the web. GIF format is impressed as lossless compression. But when GIF is compared to JPG form, GIF can only support 256 colours. So the images would only have a few distinct colours, such as line drawings, black and white images, using GIF instead of JPG can bring us better picture effects. But often 16bits colours are fine for graphics, with the significance that the fewer number of colours, the smaller the file, which is extremely important for web pages, GIF is still an excellent format for graphics designers.

JPEG

A JPG stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group which is used in photoshop and this format is commonly utilises to display images on the websites. JPEG files can also be compressed, but there is a risk of losing quality with the image. JPEG images are best utilises to represent pictures with continuous colour schemes such as landscapes or other real-world sceneries. JPG best suited for photographers and complex graphics.

TIFF

Tiff also known as Tagged Interchange File Format TIFF is the most flexible image file format. It's designed as an interchange format, to share images between many applications and hardwares. The data inside is arranged in parts, and each part has a 'tag' to identify what it is.TIFF's can contain almost any format of image data and in any arrangement. The data can be compressed in many ways, though it's almost every time used for lossless compression.

PSD:

· A PSD (Photo Shop Document) file is a layered that is proprietary to Adobe Photoshop. PSDs are useful in that they can allow you to add layers on top of each other as image, add image layers, or remove image layers also PSD is a lossless compression format. PSD files can be opened with Adobe Photoshop or Photoshop Elements on Windows or Apple Preview on Mac OS. The other positive attribute that PSD file format has is the ability to come back to a piece of work and re-edit an image.

Compression:

Compressed files use file compression in order to save disk space. Compressed file formats can loss their quality these mean that file compresses isn’t going to look as good.

Lossy:

Lossy Compression compress files to an extent where part of the file is lost which decreases the quality and the image becomes blurred also the file size is decrease. The way that lossy works is the instead of repeating the same information again and again it just gathers the amount of the same information within the same area. For example by saying "200 red dots" instead of "red dot, red dot. This type of file compression is used by JPEG which is utilised by programs like Photoshop. The advantage of Lossy of compassion method can produce a much smaller compressed file than any lossless method, while still meeting the requirements at a reasonable level.

Lossless:

Lossless compression converts data into a smaller file size by using a kind of internal shorthand to signify redundant data. For example If an original file is 3.5MB (megabytes), lossless compression can decrease the file size by about half that size, depending on the type of file that’s being compressed weather it’s a video, MP3 or an image. This type of file compression is utilised by JPEG 2000. Also lossless file compression is great for uploading different type of file to the internet without any loss of quality or information. The disadvantage to lossless file compression is that the compression ratio is not that good when it comes to a large file sizes which take a long time to compress.

Optimisation:-

Optimisation is mainly used for PDF which stands for Portable Document Format, files to decease their file size and boost the webpages display speed, saving bandwidth and the user frustration. Optimisation is utilised to compress files for the web for example images that are on the web pages on most websites. Optimisation is also used to increase images to make them clean and high quality.