Display thyself, knave!
Shiny water, texture maps, bloom, sky-boxes, billboards, vectors, anti-aliasing, particle effects, cell shading, gradients, directional lighting, and many other terms describe aspects of modern-day graphics. With the ever increasing speed of rendering, libraries, and creation tools available, the graphics become more clean, crisp and plentiful in applications from the OS to applications. This extends across more and more devices from the PC and laptop, to smartphones and smart watches.
But graphics aren't just about games and interfaces, they also are a great way to visualize expensive or difficult real-world concepts such as quantum physics, or tangible arts. Engineering most anything can be done on the computer inexpensively before rendering them in real life. In fact, the graphic image above was used to create the correct angles and form of the following sculpture.
Three dimensional graphics can be rotated about axes by using matrix-based mathematical transformations. These transformations are called quaternions, and reference a point of rotation while supplying relative positional information per affected point on a rigid body. Spline, and other skeleton-simulating methods can be used to add in relationships between multiple rigid bodies, and while I'm fairly novice where it comes to these multi-part objects... they are interesting! Take a look at the orc and goblin's skin on Lord of the rings, or the fur on the Monsters, Inc. monsters. The detail is complex, amazing, refractive/reflective, flexible, and maintain different behaviors based on the type of fur/fuzz/hair.
Those were some really trippy pictures you found. I do not consider myself to be very versed in computer graphics, but you had some good comments about 3-d graphics, and the fact that so many different fields can benefit from them. Also, you pointed out that there are a lot of deep mathematical concepts concerning graphics, so those of us who wish to go into that field should take that into account.
ReplyDeleteThe detail that computer-generate imagery (CGI) are able to portray in films these days is amazing, they look so realistic. I'm going to the The Hobbit tonight so I'll keep an eye on the orc and goblin's skin. Great blog overall with tons of information about how computer graphics can be applied in the real world. The images you have included in the blog really show off the power of computer graphics and the use of mathematics to generate images.
ReplyDeleteHi Justin,
ReplyDeleteYou did a great job in introducing computer graphic. I love reading your blog. What I like the most is that you gave your picture and text a perfect relationship by showing those beautiful pictures and talking about them.
BTW, those terms at the beginning should not be so strange for a computer game player. But I believe that most of them should not know what they really mean. For improving your blog, I think introducing them would be also very interesting.
Hey Justin,
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed reading this post. You inject a lot of personality into your writing, and it pays. It keeps the reader engaged through your entire post, and lets you bring home various points more effectively. This post was very interesting, I liked how you diverged from graphics relating to games to purposes like engineering. It hadn't occurred to me that rendering allows engineering to meticulously plan things in detail (They need to!). Great post!
Great post. I really like how you explained graphics not only using technical terms but terms that express the creativity they produce. There are great tools and libraries being created and like you have said there are so many new ways these graphics can be used to make cool pictures. Really liked the images you used too.
ReplyDelete