Goals and Delivering Product

How the 3-D art is converted to 2-D art depends on the project goals.

The developer or the design team has some idea what the art is going to be: Either it is going to be still photography, or it is going to be film, a motion picture. Film is a different kind of 3-D simply because you are not sure what the third dimension is.

People who can visualize in 2-D and 3-D sometimes have difficulty finding terms that match the dimensions. More often than not, if 2 dimensions is height and width, are 3 dimensions length--width--depth? Does length become width while width becomes depth? I mean, people can't even agree on that. If I use the term depth rather than length, then, what is 3-D? For our purposes, 2 dimensions are discussed using the terms height and width.

So, what's the 3rd dimension? Is the 3rd dimension time? If so, then this rectangle could move or enlarge in terms of frames per second.

It could come forward and dip down a little bit and then get larger and come out of the screen altogether. This movement is accomplished in frames per second.

Now you will notice that it is easy to talk about frames per second in terms of coming out of the screen. So, you have to consider whether or not coming out of the screen is a dimension. Are you taking a 3-dimensional space and using it in frames per second? Or, are you moving around on a 2-dimensional area in frames per second? Depending on what you’re doing, the 3rd dimension is either DEPTH or TIME.

Therefore, we have a 2-dimensional object coming out of the screen.

Defining terms is an activity that is associated with creating 3-D art, simply because time is most definitely a different type of dimension than space, and a team should use common terminology.

If this rectangle were only moving down the road, then you know, you would have a 2-D animation similar to the universe and the wrapping map. The rectangle would go from here to there over time.

When you create 3-D art, you need to capture that third dimension of coming at you and going away, by using the depth of the screen. It depends on how complex you want to get. More often than not, the impression of screen depth happens by using time. A lot of people aren\'t accustomed to drawing in two dimensions with the idea that a third one will occur by combining the results.

At any rate, art for an animation game, the items on the screen, have to move somewhere. The 3-D impression is created by moving items into and out of the screen over time.

This is why we say that the ProjectFun games are 2½-D because they do not use the dimension of depth, even with multiple maps.

3-D animation uses 2-D animation as a bridge. Sometimes the third dimension is the art coming out of the screen, the depth, and sometimes the third dimension is time - frames per second.

In 3-D, the developer works with the camera, the lighting, and the staging, to make the game and its characters move in a lifelike manner.