Images

 Images include graphics, such as backgrounds, color schemes and navigation bars, and photos and other illustrations  An essential part of a multimedia product, is present in every multimedia product

A picture is worth a thousand words  The major make-or-break factor of your multimedia application will always be graphics and design  Potential customers will make an instant judgement, for better of for worse, on the basis of that first impression on the screen

Production of graphics for multimedia applications  In real-life multimedia products there are two key parts of managing the production of graphics: definition of the task and the selection of the personnel  The approach to graphics should be included in the project plan  Your project team may include a graphics artist or an art director  The production team is chosen on the basis of graphics requirements

Production of graphics for multimedia applications  Organizations have quite often a pool of freelance artists; a common situation for graphics and programming

Plan your approach  Whatever is your working method, there will always be a starting point where your page is ”clean”.  Before reaching this point, be sure you have given your project a good deal of thought and planning  To get a handle on any multimedia project, you start with pencil, eraser and paper  Outline your project and graphic ideas first: make a flow chart and storyboard

Bitmaps  The more pixels used in an image the larger the actual file size; the more it consumes memory  You can’t scale a bitmapped image without losing information  Bitmapped images are often used in web pages and multimedia, but most of the time they are compressed.

Vector graphics  In computer terms a drawing is an image that consists of distinct segments or shapes, called draw objects  It is sometimes referred to as line art  A popular name for drawings in the computer world is vector graphics  The vector graphics are made in drawing programs (e.g. Illustrator)

Bitmaps vs. Vector Graphics  Remember that the programs can save images in different formats. You are not stuck with the technology you were using in the beginning.  Quite often a bitmap starts out as a set of draw objects; you’ll probably need both technologies  The vector graphic images are smaller in size than the bitmapped

Taking less space  You will usually need to reduce the size of graphics files. There are several methods: Degrading. The size in pixels can be reduced. Reducing the color depth. Compression. JPEG, GIF, PNG

Which graphics format should I use?  You have only two reasons why one format might be better than another 1.The end-user’s browsers may or may not support the format (unlikely) 2.The way the image is compressed lends itself to a particular kind of image GIF for logos, cartoons JPEG for photos, other images with smooth edges PNG both

Image compability and quality  Take care that any compression does not noticeably degrade your 24-bit images  However, you should know the difference between lossy and lossless compression methods: Lossless: you will not lose data when the image is compressed Lossy: you will lose data when the image is compressed

Asset management  Usually the number of graphics files in a multimedia application is large  Therefore it’s vital that you have a known system of naming files  Do not use too long filenames, they may create problems in some platforms  Try to organize a decent directory structure  Reserve the extension for the file type

3D drawing and rendering  3D packages are usually object- oriented like a drawing package  Speed of display is often more important than the quality; nowadays the GPU’s (not CPU) have fortunately so much computational power that the limits are not a problem  Surfaces and lightning conditions are set after the objects are drawn  The scene must be rendered to produce the final image or images; this can be very slow

Coordinate points define polygons that form 3D objects

Different materials

A foto realistic image produced by illumination and shadows

Wireframe model and a shaded surface