Beneft To Vector Art Versus Pixel Art For Games

Due to their vector nature these graphics are resolution independent meaning they can scale infinitely without losing their quality.

Beneft to vector art versus pixel art for games. Vector graphics are increasingly common as you can support multiple resolutions using a single art asset. Pixels are most commonly used in photographs and various artworks such as digital illustrations or paintings while vectors are predominantly used for simple graphics like logos icons and fonts. It s typical of any artist in most genres. Pixel is a contraction of the words picture and element.

Also you can just do plain ol digital painting in high res and scale it down to achieve the smooth edges look that certain games have braid for example which has the added benefit of making a really rough looking painting look a lot better. Pixels at least the pixels in digital art files were made to recreate photography. Since files are stored as a series of vectors the image stays sharp regardless to how large or small it is scaled. Vector art on the other hand is stored as a series of lines and shapes.

The one downside i always hear when asking other people is performance. Still most of the time there s not much of a difference in performance. Both pixel art and vector art are equally intensive to render. Most people know pixel art from old video games which had to make use of these tiny images due to the very limited capabilities of old computers.

Sure it s not as efficient to first. The idea was to recreate a photograph using a grid based system of colors and tones. They re not very different than the ones russell kirsch invented for the first digital image more than 50 years ago. It s mostly curves and straight lines anyways.

Most of the games that aren t pixel art games could easily translate the same style to vector graphics. This can be a huge boon when supporting multiple resolutions especially with mobile devices. But usually vector art is higher resolution which usually results in larger atlases texture sheets and with more atlases you could potentially take up more memory and have more draw calls. Especially mobile games with their minimalistic style could benefit here.

Vector games are quicker to make and are friendlier to cameras. It would be a lot quicker to make the art as well i think. Pixel art is just a subset of raster art in which very small images are created using very few pixels. Vector graphics aren t too hard but they aren t quite as easy to make as simple pixel art.

I prefer pixel art over vector just because i can appreciate the effort put into making them and that they are sharp and visually appealing. After writing my first article on an introduction to getting into vexel and vector art a question was raised to do with the differences between the art forms.