ACS 356: Introduction to Computer Graphics

Graphic Art Systems

Both creative and commercial art applications make extensive use of computer graphics. The abstract display in the figure shown below is created by plotting a series of mathematical functions in varying colors.

"Paintbrush" programs allow artists to create pictures on the screen of a video monitor. Actually, the artist might draw the picture on a "graphics tablet" using stylus as input. Computer-generated art is widely used in commercial applications. Logos and advertising designs for TV messages now commonly produced with graphics systems. In addition, graphics programs have been developed for applications in publishing and word processing, which allow graphics and text-editing operations to be combined.

Computer Animation

Animation is widely used in the entertainment industry, and is also being applied in education, in industrial applications such as control systems and heads-up displays and flight simulators for aircraft, and in scientific research.

A conventional animation is created in a fairly fixed sequence: the story for the animation is written, then a storyboard is laid out. A storyboard is an animation in outline form - a high level sequence of sketches showing the structure and ideas of animation. Next, the soundtrack (if any) is recorded, a detailed layout is produced, and the soundtrack is read. The detailed layout and the soundtrack are then correlated. Next certain key frames of the animation are drawn. The intermediate frames are then filled in, and a trial film is made.

Many stages of conventional animation are ideally suited to computer assistance, especially  inbetweening and coloring. Before the computer can be used for animation the images should be digitized. This can be done by optical scanning, by tracing the drawings with a data tablet, or by producing original drawings with a drawing program in the first place. The drawings may need to be preprocessed (e.g. filtered) to clean up any glitches arising from the input processes, and to smooth the contours. The composition stage, in which foreground and background figures are combined to generate the individual frames for the final animation, can be done with the image -composition techniques.

Given below is a sample of what can be achieved with animation.