Textures and Printed Media

Textures are created using Photoshop and is wrapped around 3-D model to make the model come to life. Textures are usually designed and drawn by concept artists. An example of a texture is one been done in Photoshop and looks like part of the ground which could be used in a game.

Printed media is anything in the games industry that is printed, these include: Box art, Posters, Manuals, Poster and promotional materials. The purpose of box art is to promote the game and hopefully it will boost the sales of the game. The purpose of a poster is to promote the game and gives an approximate release date. The purpose of a manual is to guide the consumer which instructions and also tells the story of the game if there is one. The purpose of promotional materials is to give the gamer an inside look at the game for example: PlayStation Official Magazine.      

Digital Camera, Scanner and Graphics Tablet

Digital Cameras are useful for taking photos to go in portpholios or projects, cameras appear anywhere nowadays they are on phones, Digital and Optical cameras are around for best quality consider a Canon or a Nikon camera with optical zoom this means it uses the glass to bring it closer to you, the cheapest would be around £300.

Scanners are very useful for scanning work for projects and coursework purposes. There are different scanners each which optimum quality. First we have a Flatbed, it scans to dpi and comes in different sizes according to paper size an A4 Flatbed costs between £30-£300 and is suited for home use. It is connected via USB. The poorest quality is the Hand Scanner because you need a steady hand to get best results from this scanner this one costs around £20.

Graphics Tablets are really helpful and useful for concept artists who have to draw to the best of his or her ability and the good thing is it will draw on a particular program and is connected via USB, the best one is an Intiq 21UX which allows you to write straight on the screen, but the best affordable one is a Wacom and they are easy to use.

File Types

JPEG (JPG)

This file type is most common and it uses compression to reduce the size of the file so you can store it without losing memory. In Paint.Net you can choose the amount of compression for JPEG files for quality reasons. The more a JPEG file is compressed, the smaller the file size, but the picture quality will be poor. JPEGs use a compression technique called lossy. This file is a raster file.

GIF

GIF stands for Graphic Interface Format and it is good for drawings and line art, but not so good for photos as they only store a maximum of 256 colours. It's a lossless format and it has pretty good image sizes. GIF files are raster.

PNG

PNG stands for Portable Network Graphics and is a lossless compression format so images keep their quality and this means larger file sizes. It is good for photos and it doesn't store any additional information. This is a raster file.

PSD (PhotoShop)

PhotoShop files are lossless and keeps images at peak quality therefore have really big file sizes also it stores loads of imformation in conjunction with the image itself; these include:Layers, Masks and Transparency. You use these for Industry standard work. This is a raster file.

TIF

TIF stands for Tagged Image File and these have large file sizes because they're high quality and can store information along with the image, TIF files usually uses a lossless compression format. This is a raster file.

BMP

BMP is short for Bitmap and they're high quality and they don't use any compression techniques so huge files, but only really used by Microsoft or Microsoft Paint. This is a raster file.

Vector formats

There are two known vector formats these are .ai and eps.

.ai is Adobe Illustrator and eps is Encapsulated Postscript they both have small file sizes and both are just files with instructions inside on how to recreate the file.