A little over a week ago, I had written a thank-you letter to a programmer whom I job shadowed, as part of an assignment for one of my university classes. I wanted to make my letter a bit more personalized, and I wanted to try out some of the Adobe software that I had received earlier in the year. During my job shadow, the programmers invited me to participate in a C# programming exercise, so I decided to draw in Adobe Illustrator a simple illustration of me in the C# session and include it in my letter. The illustration itself is simplistic, due in no small part to my elementary drawing skills, but the illustration’s style does say something. The illustration, for example, lacks colour, so that it does not distract from the rest of the letter. In addition, while the image is not incredibly detailed, its cleanness is appropriate as a letter illustration and shows that I put in a moderate amount of effort into showing appreciation.
A lot of visuals are made with computers nowadays, and it is justified; from making illustrations or diagrams with simple shapes, to editing photographs, to animation, computers have shown themselves to be versatile. For many media, using computer graphics is optional; film, for example, can just as likely be done in live actions or with hand-drawn animation, although in the case of live action, advanced visual effects are more likely to be computer generated to save money. Video games, by virtue of being played on a computer (including game consoles) in the first place, almost always have computer-generated graphics. This is where the versatility of computer graphics comes into play; computers have multiple ways of rendering visuals, ranging from realistic rendering to more cartoonish cell-shading.
With the amount of tools available, I sometimes see video games not make the most of them. One of the more commonplace phenomena is known as “Real is Brown”. A lot of modern action games, in an attempt to look realistic, use muted grey, brown, and beige colours. One video from Extra Credits points out that in doing so however, the drab pallet conflicts with the action-oriented nature of these games and can potentially ruin the game’s intended tone, citing the forgettable 2008 video game Golden Axe: Beast Rider as an example [1]. Not every game needs to be as saturated as a cartoon, of course, and no amount of anti-aliasing, texture filtering, or shading will make up for poor aesthetics in a computer-generated visual. Besides, the sheer amount of computer graphic effects is too much for one blog post, and in the end, computer graphics artists need to use their intuition to make things “look just right”.
