Computer Graphics

CG and CGI are the abbreviations for computer graphics and computer graphics imagery, respectively, and are often used interchangeably. CG literally refers to any picture or series of pictures that is generated by an artist on a computer. However, the industry convention is to use the terms CG and CGI to refer to 3D graphics and not to images created using 2D image or paint programs such as Photoshop.

Most 2D graphics software is bitmap based, whereas all 3D software is vector based. Bitmap-based software creates an image as a mosaic of pixels, filled in one at a time. Vector-based software creates an image as a series of mathematical instructions from one calculated, or graphed, point to another. This much more powerful method ...

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