Computer graphics deals with the design, manipulation, creation, computation and visualization of visual data. This field has transformed animation, film production and video game development.
Evans & Sutherland provided several of computer graphics’ pioneers with their first experiences. Pixar cofounder Edwin Catmull and Adobe cofounder John Warnock both began working there when E&S founders Dave Evans and Ivan Sutherland first established it in 1968 in Salt Lake City.
Basics
Computer graphics is the practice of employing software techniques to produce, store, modify and represent images. This technique is crucial since images often communicate more effectively than words and it can also help represent complex information visually.
Rasterization and raytracing are core techniques in computer graphics. If you’ve ever zoomed into an image to reveal an array of colourful pixels, raster graphics have likely come into play.
Computer graphics is often used for simulating the laws of physics. This requires simulating fluid and solid movements like water, fire and fabric while also enabling 3D models to break, deform and bend like they would in real life. While this field requires significant computational horsepower to operate efficiently, its results can be truly astonishing.
Visual concepts
Computer graphics is the process of producing images using digital models. It has many uses in fields like web design, 3D animation and video games as well as virtual reality simulations for training purposes and virtual training simulations.
Computer graphics has many visual components that define its aesthetics: design, typography, contrast, space and representation are all integral to creating successful computer graphics projects. You can gain these skills by studying graphic design or taking programming language courses at either university or bootcamps.
Early computer graphics systems relied heavily on vector graphics, which used straight line segments to form images. Although this approach was efficient for memory use, realistic images require curved lines which bezier curves can easily generate.
Light sources
Computer graphics employ pixels, voxels and rays to represent various visual information. Their purpose is to recreate what human eyes see – which requires modeling how light behaves on various materials that reflect light back at us.
Point lights are the simplest type of illumination source, characterized by color, intensity and falloff – for instance a simple bulb hanging by its cord can serve as such an example.
Normalization refers to clamping the color between zero and one so that any values between zero and one are replaced by 1. This process ensures accurate display on a screen.
3D engines
In the 1970s, modern video game arcades and 3D computer graphics began emerging. Moore’s law still held true, providing developers with more power to push for realistic images.
Game engines that use pre-existing game engines to manage this vantage point and provide players with an interactive experience can save both development time and provide familiar interactive playback.
A game engine may include scripting and artificial intelligence programming to allow characters to react realistically, as well as physics capabilities (e.g. database of rules that dictate object and character behavior). Furthermore, game engines typically utilize bi-directional reflectance distribution functions (BRDFs) in these applications for increased realism.
Fractals
The computer graphics pipeline accepts descriptions of three dimensional objects as vertex primitives (points, lines, triangles), then produces screen pixels with their associated RGB colors values. Pixels possess two properties: their location in 2D space as well as an RGB hue value.
Vertex Processing, the first stage in the pipeline, transforms individual vertices. They are first grouped together into primitive shapes like triangles before being rasterized; finally each fragment resulting from this stage covers an approximate square region on screen, and its attributes are interpolated accordingly.
GPU depth testing checks whether each fragment can be seen in the final image by comparing its z-value with that of nearby fragments whose pixels share its color value; this process helps avoid drawing transparent or hidden surfaces that cannot be seen by humans.
