Digital Graphics: Graphics Styles

Abstraction

Abstraction is where the designer or artist is not trying to make to make the enviroment or object in question look real. Instead the designer is trying to make a world that will draw you in by giving you the alution that the world that your playing in could be a real place.

If you look at Lost Vikings the enviroment there in just does not exsist in the real world if it did we would be mormons with big black eyes. But it does have things that do exswist in real life like grass and rock.

Sonic could be used as anouther example on enviroment abstraction ass in real world we dont have footpaths with loop the loops in them nore do we have moving platforms. we do however have trees and clouds etc.

There is a number of famous games that use abstract art such as lemmings on the Amiga.

Also on the Amiga we had James Pond 2

exaggeration

Exaggeration is when you take something and make in to something it is not. We sometimes exaggerate to get people to take notice we may do this by saying something like "I saw a rat and it was the size of a house" obviously a rat can't be the size of a house. In a cartoon we may have a scene where our character gets his/her foot stamped on. So we may take the eyes and enlarge them so there popping out from the face.

You can use this technique in game design too you may want to exaggerate your hero's weapons or have objects react in a way they wouldn't in real life.

What does exaggeration look like

As you can see every enemy that gets a smack from Wario gets exaggerated in some way.

Also as you can tell from this cartoon picture the face has been exaggerated as if he has seen something shocking or maybe something else in the scene has happened.

Games that use exaggeration

Wario Land 4: GBA

Street Fighter 2: SNES

Cel_Shading

Cel Shading or Toon Shading as it's sometimes called is a type of rendering that gives the imprestion
of been hand drawn. This style of rendering is offten used to mimic a comic book or cartoon.
Cel Shading starts off with a conveninal 3D model and the lighting is calculated to smaller amounts to
give a more flatter look. Thing of when you draw a 2d picture and come to the shading and use 3 or 4 shades of the same color to give the apperance of a 3D object.

What does Cel Shading look like?

This is a screen from Streetfighter IV

As you can see it is very cartoonish with

lots of bright colors. It also has the apperance

of been hand drawn.

Cel shading is not just for the Japanese anime looking games or style. The use of it in 3rd person shooters like Quake3 worked well too.

The envioroments here were fun and very pleasing to the eye and did not distract you like many newer games do.

Famous games that used Cel_Shading

The Legend of Zelda Wind Waker: GC

Breath of Fire Dragons Quater: PS2

phtorealism

Photorealism is a style of painting that involves taking a photograph and/or other referance pictures

and from these produce a new picture that looks as real as possible. The term photorealism was primeraly

used to describe paintings from the United States Art Movment that started in the late 1960's early 1970's. In terms of computer graphics it is taking these same referance pictures and producing a render and displaying them to the screen.

What do it look like?

Photorealistic graphics look like the objects or enviroments the artist is trying to portray. These graphics are not just centered around gaming but of real life objects and places. Here is a render of a bench:

The render looks like someone had just taken a picture of a bench
with there camera.