The principles of Beginning Graphic Design | Fundamentals of Designing

Fundamentals of Designing :

The principles of Beginning Graphic Design | Fundamentals of Designing

Concept of 2D& 3D Graphics

In the 2D system, we use only two coordinates X and Y but in 3D, an extra coordinate Z is added. 3D graphics techniques and their application are fundamental to the entertainment, games, and computer-aided design industries. It is a continuing area of research in scientific visualization.

2D Graphics

Raster graphics also called bitmap graphics, a type of digital image that uses tiny rectangular pixels, or picture elements, arranged in a grid formation to represent an image. Because the format can support a wide range of colors and depict subtly graduated tones, it is well-suited for displaying continuous-tone images such as photographs or shaded drawings, along with other detailed images.

2D graphics models may combine geometric models (also called vector graphics), digital images (also called raster graphics), text to be typeset (defined by content, font style and size, color, position, and orientation), mathematical functions and equations, and more. These components can be modified and manipulated by two-dimensional geometric transformations such as translation, rotation, scaling. In object-oriented graphics, the image is described indirectly by an object endowed with a self-rendering method—a procedure which assigns colors to the image pixels by an arbitrary algorithm.

Two-dimensional facial animation is commonly based upon the transformation of images, including both images from still photography and sequences of video. Image morphing is a technique that allows in-between transitional images to be generated between a pair of the target still images or between frames from sequences of video.

In many domains, such as desktop publishing, engineering, and business, a description of a document based on 2D computer graphics techniques can be much smaller than the corresponding digital image. This representation is also more flexible since it can be rendered at different resolutions to suit different output devices.

2D:

- 2D is used to create flat digital images.

- X and Y horizontal and vertical axis are used in 2D.

- 2D graphics are used for printing and drawing applications.

- 2D graphics are vector-based graphics.

3D Graphics

Three-dimensional computer graphics are graphics that use a three-dimensional representation of geometric data.3D computer graphics are works of graphic art that were created with the aid of digital computers and specialized 3D software.

3D computer graphics are often referred to as 3D models. Apart from the rendered graphic, the model is contained within the graphical data file. However, there are differences: a 3D model is the mathematical representation of any 3D object.

3D:

- 3D graphics represent 3-dimensional representations of geometric data, such as length, breadth, and depth.

- 3D graphics fall into 3 categories:

1. 3D modeling – the process of forming the computer model of an object.
2. Layout and Animation – movement and placing and object in a scene are known as layout and animation.
3. 3D rendering – computer calculations that are based on light placement, surface types generate an image.

At their most basic levels, 2D and 3D graphics are very similar. For the most part, objects are moved around by affine transformations. Colors are applied based on rules that we come up with however we like. Collisions are calculated with bounding volume hierarchies. There are a few significant ways in which 3D graphics are more complex than 2D graphics.

1. Perspective

2D graphics come from 2D scenes mapped to a 2D screen, so very little has to be done to make the scene human-understandable. 3D scenes don't work as easily because we can't make a 2D screen display 3D data without a loss of information. Choosing which pieces of information to lose is difficult.

We could take a cross-section of the scene, but then we lose the ability to see both far-away things and close up things. We could project everything directly onto the screen by pretending everything is at the same depth (orthographic projection), but this makes a cat 10 miles away look the same as one at your feet. Most of the time, we work with perspective transformations, which act like the human eye by making things seem smaller and smaller as they get further away.

This property of 3D scenes means we have to be very careful with scale, and the parameters of our virtual camera to make sure we have exactly what we want in our scene.

2. Shading models

In true 2D, we often just assign colors to objects in the scene. Like a cartoon, objects shaded in this way do not respond realistically to changes in lighting. In 2D this does not bother us, because we already have some suspension of disbelief working in a smaller space.

In 3D, the cartoony look can be neat, but it generally looks unpleasantly flat and dull. Even for cartoony videogames like The Legend of Zelda: Wind Walker, there is a lot of computation done to determine how dark or light something will be based on lighting conditions. This requires about as much computation as the realistic style seen in games like Halo: Combat Evolved.

Shading models consider the effects of orientation, position, and color of both lights and objects to make objects look realistic. Some nice properties are: the object is darker when facing slightly away from the light than it is facing it directly, lights don't illuminate occluded objects, further away lights, blue light makes blue things bright but doesn't affect orange things much.

The way in which the colors of objects are calculated differs between movies and, games, but they follow the same general principles, and these principles are not often used in 2.

3. Optics

What does a mirror show you in 2D? I'd guess nothing at all. Any mirror you could see in 2D is facing out of the scene, so you're not likely to see the characters reflected in it. If it's at 45 degrees, maybe it shows you some of the scene, but in 2D, this is something artists have drawn, not something the machine has computed.

Mirrors, glass, black holes, water, metals, glazed ceramics, butterfly wings and many other materials have more than a diffuse color. They have transparency, specular reflectance, indices of refraction (which leads to lensing), gravity (which leads to a different kind of lensing), interference, and many other optical properties. These affect not just how things look, but also what you can see, and how much of the scene the computer has to look at before painting the screen.

4. The curse of high dimensions

Unfortunately, the cost of doing things in 3D is quite high. Not only do we work with more complex models in 3D, but even our simple ones simply take longer to compute. This means that every frame in a 3D scene takes a lot longer to draw than it would in a 2D scene. This is why a lot of older games like StarCraft used 2D graphics even though 3D graphics were available at the time. The 3D graphics were too slow for the computers of the time.

These days, computers are exponentially faster, and many things that were not possible to do at 60fps now are. The work isn't over yet though. The reason games like Sky rim don't look photorealistic isn't that we don't know how to replicate reality. It's that replicating reality takes a few days to render each frame.

Concept of Points & Lines

Points

A point is a coordinate without any dimensions, without any area. Points are the simplest element of visual design. By definition, we can’t actually draw a point, since to see one would require it has dimensions.
What we can draw is a dot. In fact, dots are the building blocks of everything else. Any other mark we make can be seen as one or more dots in combination. Every shape, form, mass, or blob with a recognizable center is essentially a dot regardless of its size.
Dots establish a relationship with the space around it. The two most important relationships formed are the proportion of the dot and space around it and the position of the dot within that space.
As dots increase in size we start to see them as shapes, but they still retain their fundamental dot-like qualities and characteristics.

Lines

A line is a series of points adjacent to each other. Where a point has no dimension, a line has one dimension. They have a length, but nothing else. In reality, a line would need a second dimension to actually see it, but we’ll continue to call them lines and not something else here.
The fundamental characteristic of a line is to connect or unite. This connection can be visible or invisible.
Where dots are about the position, lines are about movement and direction. A line leads somewhere, your eye moves along it seeking one or both of its endpoints. This movement and direction make lines inherently dynamic The flip side of connecting is separating. Lines not only connect elements, but they can also separate elements. As lines become thicker they begin to be perceived as planes or surfaces and they gain mass. To maintain their identity as lines they must increase in length as they increase in width

A single line traveling in a curve around a fixed, invisible point with an unchanging distance from that point, eventually joins it’s a starting point and becomes a circle. The thinner the line the more the emphasis is on the quality of direction. The thicker the line the more emphasis is moved to the quality of mass and away from the quality of direction. The endpoints of a line can be seen or appear to move toward infinity.