Presentation Graphics

Another major application area is presentation graphics, used to produce illustrations for reports or to generate 35-mm slides or transparencies for use with projectors. Presentation graphics is commonly used to summarize financial, statistical, mathematical, scientific, and economic data for research reports, managerial reports, consumer information bulletins, and other types of reports. Workstation devices and services bureaus exist for converting screen displays into 35-mm slides or overhead transparencies for use in presentations. Typical examples of presentation graphics are bar charts, line graphs, surface graphs, pie charts, and other displays showing relationships between multiple parameters.

A survey of Computer Graphics

The major use of computer graphics is in design processes, Particularly for engineering and architectural systems, but almost all products are now computer designed. Generally referred to as CAD, computer-aided design methods are now routinely used in the design of building, automobiles, aircraft, watercraft, space craft, computers, textiles, and many other products.
For some design applications, objects are first displayed in a wireframe outline form that shows the overall shape and internal features of objects. Wireframe display also show designers to quickly see the effects of interactive adjustments to design shapes.
Software packages for CAD applications typically provide the designer with a multi-window environment. The various displayed windows can show enlarged sections or different views of objects.
The shapes used in a design represent the different network or circuit components. Standard shapes for electrical, electronic and logic circuits are often supplied by the design package.
Animations are often used in CAD applications. Real-time animations using wireframe displays on a video monitor are useful for testing performance of a vehicle or system. When we do not display objects with rendered surfaces, the calculation for each segment of the animation can be performed quickly to produce a smooth real-time motion on the screen. Animations in virtually environment are used to determine how vehicle operators are affected by certain motions.

Computer Art

Computer graphics methods are widely used in both fine arts and commercial art applications. Artists use a variety of computer methods, including special purpose hardware, artist's paintbrush programs (such as Lumena), other paint packages (such as PixelPaint and SuperPaint), specially developed softwares, symbolic mathematics packages (such as Mathematica), CAD packages, desktop publishing software, and animation packages that provide facilities for designing object shapes and specifying object motions.
Fine artists use a variety of other computer technologies to produce images. For many applications of commercial art (and in motion pictures and other applications), photorealistic techniques are used to render images of a product. Animations are also used frequently in advertising, and television commercials are produced frame by frame, where each frame of the motion is rendered and saved as an image file. In each successive frame, the motion is simulated by moving object positions slightly from their positions in the previous frame. When all frames in the animation sequence have been rendered, the frames are transferred to film or stored in a video buffer for playback. Film animations require 24 frames for each second in the animation second sequence. If the animation is to be played back on a video monitor, 30 frames per second are required.
A common graphics method employed in many commercials is morphing, where one object is transformed into another. This method has been used in TV commercials to turn an oil can into an automobile engine, an automobile into a tiger, a puddle of water into a tire, and one person's face into another face.