Asset Management

To make doing things easier, naming of files appropriately can be a boost in the right direction as this will allow you to easily identify what each file is without having to look at the file itself which saves time which is a luxury that some people don’t have, so doing this helps. As well as naming files appropriately, it’s also a good idea to name folders appropriately and make as many as is needed, such as a folder for storing textures, scenes and images when modelling games. This makes it much easier to identify where everything is easily. As well you could manage these files as well by putting more folders in the texture folder, such as having textures in one folder for certain objects/scenes which makes everything much tidier and much easier to manage. To sort out storage, it is best to save this on a cloud server and an external hard drive as well as its original location, this will prevent any unexpected errors from creating a loss of work.

Optimising

 Optimizing is the art of getting a file to be the best it can be without being too large of a file size, an example of this is with a photograph, in its original format it is of high quality and high file size. Optimizing this would mean decreasing the quality to decrease the file size. A picture with the aspect ratio of 2:6:1 will have both high quality and high file size due to a higher resolution. When optimized this may decrease to something such as 23:1 which still has moderately good quality but with a much reduced file size.

Image Capture

There are many ways that an image can be captured digitally, examples of these are:

Using a camera to take a photograph to gain either, inspiration for an object or to photograph a texture to use in modelling
Using a scanner to capture an image of something on a piece of paper to allow editing it on a computer such as using Photoshop to change the image as seen fit.
Using a graphics tablet to draw something that then appears on the screen when drawn, this can be used for such things as concept art, allowing the person drawing to make changes to what they are doing instead of starting again making this much more efficient than using paper and pencil.

File Extensions

Each file extension has a different specialty in which is uses to make the file fit for purpose such as .WMV, this file is used to optimize viewing videos in Windows media player.

 Image file formats.

Files such as .Jpg sacrifice image quality to allow the file size to be smaller and therefore more usable and friendly in terms of storage. .Jpg is a lossless file format.

.Png (Portable Network Graphic) is another lossless file format.

JPEG contains lossy compression


HAM is another lossy compressed file

Exaggeration

This type of graphic style is, as suggested, highly exaggerated. Examples of Exaggerated graphics are Manga games such as dragonball-Z or games that make people look different to how they should, such as gears of war. In these games the people are made to look much bigger than they would in the real world, In alot of cases the muscles that a person has are usually Exaggerated to make the character appear stronger and more leaderlike. In other cases Hair of the characters can be really exaggerated, examples of these are Manga games.

Pixel! What in the wonderful world, is a pixel?

A pixel is essentially a dot of colour, this colour is assigned instructions as to what colour it needs to be, these are essential to digital graphics as they are the basic building blocks of anything that is digital as these give it colour and form depending on the code for the required pixel which varies depending on what colour is needed, this can differ based on what type of pixel it is, raster or vector.
A pixel is made up of a combination of 3 colours; red, blue and green. With this, the colour is determined by a code, and that code will have so much red blue and green in it which is called the RGB scale.
This pictures shows an example of the RGB scale in use, it shows that white is made from 93% of each colour where as the Yellow is made from only red and green. The picture also shows that the image will pixilate the more zoomed in it gets.

Vector graphics re-scale the size of the image by re-sending the instructions for it but to accommodate a larger size when zoomed in, this works in terms of photographic digital graphics. In games these work differently and were primarily used in older generation games due to limitations of this type of graphic. Vector graphics are made up of curves that is based on information which means that they can me scaled infinitly without a loss of quality. Uses of vector graphics can include creating logo's and fonts.
This picture shows how the two types of graphic differ, the bitmap image (raster) will substantially pixilated when zoomed in, this is because the image will remain as it is and will not compensate for the zoom. The vector graphic will be redrawn to compensate for the zoom witch means that it will not pixilate and will be clear.

Raster graphics are created entirely of pixels which consequently means that the quality of the image will drop when enlarged as the pixels will not compensate for the larger zoom. This type of graphic is good for digital photos and game textures that need to be high quality, the only downside is they have a large file size. This type of graphic is widely used on the internet as it is has good quality.

Compression

What is compression?

Compression is the technique used to reduce the size of something  in this case, a file size on a computer to make it more easily usable. In digital graphics this is used for decreasing the file size of an image or object.

Lossy- This is a type of compression that deals with making the file size smaller with the side effect of reducing the quality. This happens due to part of the file being discarded to allow the file to be smaller.

JPEG is an example of a lossy file type as it can become blocky at high compression ratios.

Lossless - this is when a set of algorithms extracts the exact original data and reconstructs it with a compression.

PNG is an example of a lossless file type as the quality remains the same but with a decreased file size.

Effects of compression

The most obvious effects that can occur when compressing a file are loss of data and decreased quality.




This is an example of compression, as can be seen the image quality is drastically decreased as is the file size of the image. The clearest image is without compression, then a compression is applied and a loss of quality has occurred, this happens again when more compression is applied, with the increase in compression, the file size is decreased.