Page 168 - DCAP303_MULTIMEDIA_SYSTEMS

Multimedia Systems

notes 4. Willingness to accept criticism: Eventually you will feel motivated to submit your art for
review by other artists. 3D artists can nitpick like no one else in the world, so be prepared
to have even the slightest error pointed out to you in exacting detail—especially if you
are attempting to create anything realistic. If you intend to work in a studio one day, your
ability to accept criticism will be crucial to the overall success of the team.
10.1.2 types of 3D art

The 3D is a broad subject, and a typical finished composition will be composed of several—perhaps
dozens—of hours of work in an array of skills. What follows is an overview of the subjects you
will need to learn to be a well-rounded 3D artist.
Modelling: Modelling is the act of creating a 3D mesh, whether the end result is a bug-eyed alien
or a teacup. How you get to that finished model depends largely on the methods that make the
most sense to you.
animation: Animation is the process of taking a 3D object and getting it to move. Animation
comes in a few different flavours. There’s keyframe animation, where the animator manipulates
the objects on a frame-by-frame basis, similar to hand-drawn cartoons. Other methods of animation
include placing objects on splines and setting them to follow the path of the curve, or importing
motion capture data and applying it to a character rig. Another way to animate is to use your 3D
application’s built-in physics engines, such as when your scene requires that objects fall.
texturing: Without some kind of texture art, everything will be variations of solid colours. The
most common and accurate way to create a texture for a model is to “unwrap” the mesh (flatten
it out) and paint over it in an application such as Photoshop. The final texture is then “wrapped”
over the original mesh again. Depending on how a model is created, each section may have its
own texture, i.e., a separate texture for hands, one for arms and one for the torso of a character,
all made to blend together seamlessly.
rendering: Rendering an image is typically the last step, and is perhaps the most important part.
It is often overlooked by beginners, who are more focused on creating models and animating
them. There are many aspects to creating a good final render of a scene, including attention to
camera placement, lighting choices which may affect mood, shadows, reflections, transparency
and the handling of special effects, such as fluids or grasses.

10.2 image editing tools

Image editing encompasses the processes of altering images, whether they are digital photographs,
traditional analogue photographs, or illustrations. Graphic software programs, which can be
broadly grouped into vector graphics editors, raster graphics editors, and 3D modellers, are the
primary tools with which a user may manipulate, enhance, and transform images. Many image
editing programs are also used to render or create computer art from scratch.

10.2.1 Basics of image editing
Raster images are stored in a computer in the form of a grid of picture elements, or pixels. These
pixels contain the image’s colour and brightness information. Image editors can change the pixels
to enhance the image in many ways. The pixels can be changed as a group, or individually, by the
sophisticated algorithms within the image editors. The domain of this primarily refers to bitmap
graphics editors, which are often used to alter photographs and other raster graphics. However,
vector graphics software, such as Adobe Illustrator or Ink scape, are used to create and modify
vector images, which are stored as descriptions of lines, Bézier splines, and text instead of pixels.
It is easier to rasterize a vector image than to vectorize a raster image; how to go about vectorizing
a raster image is the focus of much research in the field of computer vision. Vector images can be

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