#and more properties from this same studio in this same half rendered video game style

[bambeedeere]

but what if asoiaf were an animated tv show by the same ppl who made blue eye samurai hear me out hear me out

[aion-rsa]

Dark Alliance Reminds Us We Need a Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers Remaster

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The verdict on the recently released Dungeons and Dragons: Dark Alliance is still being decided as fans and critics finally get their hands on the highly-anticipated Action-RPG, but you’re not alone if the mere thought of the game has you dreaming of a Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers remaster.

Released in October 2002 (a couple of months ahead of the film it shares a name with), Lord of The Rings: The Two Towers was a hack and slash action game eventually available for PlayStation 2, Xbox, and GameCube as well as Game Boy Advance and even cell phones. The story goes that publisher EA and developer Stormfront Studios were supposed to make a similar game based on Fellowship of the Ring, but in 2001, all parties involved realized that the game wouldn’t be finished in time for the movie’s global release. As such, the work that had gone into that title was carried over to an adaptation of The Two Towers.

We have to stop there for a second. See, it’s pretty hard to separate the Two Towers game from the Lord of the Rings films, and not just for the positive reasons you probably think of when you remember that game. While 2002 wasn’t quite the darkest time for video game adaptations of TV shows and movies, many gamers had been burned by half-hearted adaptations too many times before to be inherently excited about the idea of “living the movie” that we were still being sold on. There were some circles in which the mere mention of a Lord of the Rings game based on the beloved movie drew hesitant sighs and concerned groans.

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However, you also have to understand just how big The Lord of the Rings was at that time. Prior to Fellowship‘s premiere, the odds were good that you either grew up with the books and thought there was no way that the movies could do them justice, or you had never read the books but were feeling cynical about the idea of another franchise blockbuster after The Phantom Menance. In either case, what many of us saw when we first saw Fellowship of the Ring could only be described as magical.

The Two Towers obviously benefited from its association with a property that had ignited the imagination and spirits of film fans across the world, but one of the most fascinating things about the game wasn’t just that it would feature levels, characters, and footage from 2001’s Fellowship of the Ring but 2002’s The Two Towers as well. That meant Two Towers players would actually get to see and play parts of The Two Towers movie two months before it was released in theaters for a global audience.

It was kind of a gimmick, but it was a great one. Much like Enter the Matrix, The Two Towers initially sold itself on the promise of not just letting us dive into a world we loved but actually showing us parts of that world we hadn’t seen before. For a generation in awe that was still processing the grandeur and impact of Fellowship of the Ring, this was more than we could have ever dared ask for. It would have been enough if the games treated the source material with respect (which they did) but to offer us a preview of the movie we stayed up at night thinking of? It was an idea so far beyond what so many of us wanted: an excuse to be in that world for just a little longer and maybe even have our own adventure while we were there.

Yet, when I think back on the Two Towers or hope for a re-release, I rarely dwell on the ways that the game innovated. Honestly, I more often find myself thinking back on the ways that the game was so wonderfully simple and even familiar.

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Honestly, there’s not a lot that separates Two Towers from Double Dragon, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade games, and so many beat ’em ups of the golden era of that genre. In all cases, the premise is rather simple. You walk across linear, but often beautiful, levels and mash a few buttons to wail on the various enemies in your path. You may have to throw in a special attack here and there (and Two Towers utilized a basic character upgrade and experience system for good measure), but the formula is pretty much the same as it ever was.

Compared to something like 2001’s Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance, Two Towers was almost comically simple. In fact, I can remember some at the time referring to the game as a watered-down version of those more Diablo-like experiences. Honestly, it wasn’t an entirely unfair criticism if you were determined to stack those games side-by-side based on a few similarities. Games like Dark Alliance offered dozens (or more) hours of rich action-RPG gameplay in lush fantasy settings, and Two Towers could be beaten in a handful of hours with relatively little skill or effort.

Furthermore, it always felt a bit strange to boil The Lord of the Rings down to action sequences. The movies absolutely took the action scenes from the books to a new level, but the games made little to no effort to recreate or expand the more subtle storytelling and character-building elements that really made the books and movies everything they were. Just about any modern critique of The Two Towers game written by someone who has no nostalgia for the game would likely (and perhaps rightfully) focus on the game’s simple combat, abbreviated storytelling, and all-around basic nature.

Years later, though, that’s actually the aspect of the game that I feel has aged best throughout the years. I could rant about how Two Towers‘ short, sweet, and complete design is a breath of fresh air compared to the onslaught of open-world games that seem to secretly want to be live service titles, but the beauty of The Two Towers isn’t the idea it’s somehow this bastion of noble game design. It’s more about how it so perfectly represents the idea that a good beat ’em up never really grows old. From the original genre innovators to modern throwbacks and even those titles that tried to do a bit more with the genre (such as Rockstar’s brilliant The Warriors), these games offer a kind of simple pleasure that sadly seems to be harder to justify at a time of escalation in game production.

Mostly, though, fond memories of The Two Towers are rightfully often rooted in the thrill of experiencing a loving tribute to the early Lord of the Rings movies with friends. It’s been said that it’s easier to make a game where the joy of playing with others allows you to overlook game design elements that would otherwise bug you, and maybe there’s some truth to that. Even negative reviews of Dungeons and Dragons: Dark Alliance published so far tend to mention that the game can still be a good time when played with others. It’s just more fun to play with friends, and you could certainly argue that there have been game developers who rely on that quality to sell games that would otherwise be unappealing.

The thing that’s easy to love about Two Towers is how openly it embraces that philosophy. The game isn’t trying to be much more than it is by forcing in systems and mechanics that ultimately bloat what the game actually does so well. Just about any gamer of any skill level with a friend by their side, an extra controller, and a love for The Lord of the Rings movies can hop into Two Towers and experience exactly what that game was meant to provide: a simply fun time designed to make you celebrate this thing you love and not feel exploited.

That’s what makes the fact that we’ll probably never get a remaster or remake of the Two Towers (or its exceptional follow-up, Return of the King) due to the complicated nature of the licenses involved so upsetting. WB mostly controls the rights to Lord of the Rings games now, and even if they were willing to allow EA to remaster or remake these games, it’s not entirely clear how that process would work or how much of the original games’ film footage and “DVD” extras could be retained. It’s always tragic when licensing gets in the way of our ability to enjoy a gaming experience, and it’s especially sad when licensing impacts our ability to enjoy a game that not only celebrated its license but gave many of us reason to believe in licensed games again.

Yet, I refuse to give up hope. As we near the 20th anniversary of Fellowship of the Ring later this year and the 20th anniversary of The Two Towers‘ game next year, now feels like the perfect time to revive these classic hacks and slash beat ’em ups. Without them, a new generation of Lord of the Rings fans must rely on dwindling backward compatibility support and emulations just so the idea of a simply enjoyable Lord of the Rings game easily shared with friends doesn’t go from history to legend and legend to myth as much that once was in gaming becomes lost.

The post Dark Alliance Reminds Us We Need a Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers Remaster appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[corixus]

Computational colour rendering

1 Photorealism  

The term "photorealism" has different meanings for graphics researchers and artists. For artists, who are the target consumers of the techniques of photorealism, it refers to a school of painting that focuses on reproducing the effect of a camera lens.  For researchers, pioneer work in computer graphics was done to achieve photorealism, where the goal was to create digital images that can be mistaken for photographs.  

2 Digital painters

Digital painters are computer programmes created so that a computer can be used as a source of ‘paints’ and ‘brushes’ which simulate traditional painting on canvas or on any other surface. Digital painters use a special pen or stylus to paint stroke-by stroke on the screen of a computer, tablet or mobile phone. The creative process is exactly the same as traditional painting.   Artists can create shapes, change brush tips and freely choose and mix colours.  

3 Non-photorealistic rendering

Since the work of Haeberli  in 1990, non-photorealistic rendering became one of the main fields in Computer Graphics.   Non-photorealistic rendering (NPR) is an area of computer graphics that focuses on producing algorithms to create a wide variety of expressive styles of digital art. Most of the related research focuses on representing a 3D scene by making a two-dimensional image of it with a digital camera or scanner.  The image is then manipulated with computer algorithms which lead to artistic-like pictures.  In contrast to traditional computer graphics, which focused on photorealism, NPR is inspired by artistic styles such as painting, drawing, technical illustration, and cartoons. NPR is now a mainstay of movies and video games, as well as in scientific visualization, architectural illustration and animation. Many of the computer programs are intended to mimic a desired artistic style, such as watercolor, impressionism, or pen and ink drawing. For example, ‘sketchy style’ is a rendering form that mimics hand-drawn art.  Many of these NPR systems provide the user with a canvas that they can "paint"  or draw on, using the computer’s cursor.     As the user paints, a stylized version of the image is revealed on the screen. This is especially useful for people who want to simulate different sizes of brush strokes according to different areas of the image.  Another NPR technique simulates the dynamics of the painter's medium, such as the diffusion of ink through different kinds of paper, and also of pigments through water for simulation of watercolor.

4 Computer encoding

The ways in which art-making can incorporate computer-based digital encoding are extremely diverse.  A digital photograph may be the product of a manipulated sample of visual information captured with a digital camera from a “live” scene or digitised with a scanner from a traditional celluloid photograph. Music can be recorded and then manipulated digitally or created digitally with specialised computer software.    A movie is now the product of an extremely complex sequence of choices between analog and digital processes at the stages of image and sound capture or composition, image and sound editing, color correction or sound mastering, special effects production, and display or projection.

In its broadest sense, “computational painting” refers to two-dimensional art that relies on computer-based digital encoding, or the electronic storage and processing of information in a common binary code. One of the main goals of all painting and drawing algorithms is to suggest scene content in a simplified or stylized manner. Such stylised depictions are often surprisingly effective in capturing the viewer’s interest despite their departure from realism. The manipulated image is often seen as being more desirable than the original.  Within a particular historical style there may be options for introducing a personal style like Van Gogh;s or Cezanne’s way of handling paint.In this connection,  one of the  goals is to better understand how stylized images depict scene properties and activate aesthetic response of a viewer to different styles.  Instead of rendering photorealistic images the focus lies on the application of artistic and stylistic characteristics to digital images.

5 Cartoon/fresco

A cartoon is a type of two-dimensional illustration.  The concept originated in the Middle Ages and first described a preparatory drawing for a piece of art, such as a painting, fresco, tapestry, or stained glass window.  The objective of Cartoon Style Rendering is to produce a cartoon-looking art work out of a real or imagined 3D scene.

The major stylistic features of a cartoon are those of the fresco. The earliest known examples of frescoes date at around 1500 BC and are to be found on the island of Crete. The most famous of these, The Toreador, depicts a sacred ceremony in which individuals jump over the backs of large bulls. While some similar frescoes have been found in other locations around the Mediterranean basin, particularly in Egypt and Morocco, their origins are subject to speculation. The most common form of fresco was Egyptian wall paintings in tombs. But it was only in the 14th century, mainly through the works of the Italian painter Giotto, that the fresco technique gained more and more importance among the Fine Arts

In fresco the pigment is painted onto wet plaster which can be worked on only for about a day after application. The artist relies far more on flat colour and line to describe form.   Form is  summarised into simple shapes of tone with minimal blending.  It  relies strongly on line to describe form.   Deep shadow is difficult to portray in fresco. Dark colours are possible, but they tend to look flat, rather than creating an illusion of deep space in the way that a transparent glaze of dark oil paint does.  It is really  difficult in fresco to create the illusion of space. All this actually makes fresco good for decorative or patterned work which relies on flat areas of colour and tone that contrast with each other.   Because of this, fresco painters had to work in a higher register of colour because effectively half of the spectrum of tone is denied to them.  Many of these visual characteristics of fresco are also those of modern cartoons.

6 Impressionist style rendering

In the 1800's, Claude Monet created paintings that attempted to catch the fleeting impression of sunlight on objects. And it was this out-of-doors world he wanted to capture in paint -- as it actually was at the moment of seeing it, not worked up in the studio from sketches.

Impressionist art violated all traditional academic rules of artistic painting when it first appeared in the 19th century. The objective was to portray the artist’s perceptual impression and recreate this impression to the eyes of the beholder, rather than recreate details of a reality as seen by the artist.  In a review published in Le Siècle on 29 April 1874, Jules Castagnary was the first art critic to use the term Impressionism in a positive way:

"The shared point of view that makes them a group with a collective force of its own... is their decision not to strive for detailed finished, but to go no further than a certain overall aspect. Once the impression has been discerned and set down, they declare their task finished. ...If we are to describe them with a single word, we must invent the new term Impressionists. They are Impressionists in the sense that they depict not the landscape but the sensation produced by the landscape."

The Impressionists also understood that light and shadow are seen in glances and moments, and are ever changing. They began to worry less about smooth transitions of color and more about making the color and contrast stand out, to catch the eye like they would in real life.

For artists, wanting to paint in an Impressionist style use brighter colours and mix less on the palette. Also, make shorter brush strokes and set a timer to force yourself to paint quicker.

Impressionism  was a distinct departure from the realist style, where brush strokes are less prominent in favor of near-photographic quality in the paintings. While most realistic styles depicted historical and nobler subjects impressionists use their human faculties of perception to depict more mundane contemporary subjects.

7 Introducing poetry

It has been said that the aim of computational painting is to introduce poetry into a photograph.  The procedure is; choose a subject; arrange it aesthetically; digitise it; then render it stylistically.  Outcomes of this sequence of creativity are illustrated with the following three images. A digital photograph was taken with a Cannon IXUS 12x.  It was optimised with Paintshop Pro. Then two images were produced from the digital picture by rendering it  with the ‘cartoon’ and ‘impressionistic colour style’ Topaz Labs plug-ins to Corel PaintShop Prox8.

Fig 1 My apples: Canon digital camera

Fig 2 My apples: impressionistic colour style rendering

Fig 3 My apples: cartoon/fresco style rendering

8 Rendering of aerial photographs

Recently developed automated methods of image enhancement and classification are useful for interpreting aerial photographs, and help address some of the problems with traditional photo interpretation. Automated analysis of digital imagery has evolved over time into two main approaches. Conventional automated image analysis has been conducted on a per-pixel basis, whereby enhancement and classification algorithms are applied to individual pixels. While “pixel-based” approaches are relatively easy to implement, the representation of landscape elements with pixels may be less relevant for non-rectangular features. A contrasting approach is that of object-based analysis. The basic premise of the most common object-based approaches is that neighbouring pixels of similar properties are merged to form objects (using a process termed segmentation) before analysis. The resulting objects can then be classified using quantitative characteristics such as tone and colour, size, shape, texture, and contextual relationships, similar to the approach used by manual interpreters. This method is particularly promising because it can create objects over multiple target scales and sizes to represent  vegetation patterns in ecosystems.  For example. the display colour assignment for any band of a multispectral digital image can be done in an entirely arbitrary manner. In this case, the colour of a target in the displayed image does not have any resemblance to its actual colour. The resulting product is known as a false colour composite image. There are many possible schemes of producing false colour composite images. However, some scheme may be more suitable for detecting certain objects in the image. This false colour composite scheme allows vegetation to be detected readily in the image. In this type of false colour composite images, vegetation appears in different shades of a primary colour depending on the types and conditions of the vegetation.

9 Internet references

http://www.gravetyemanor.co.uk/sites/default/files/press-release/country_life_magazine.pdf

http://www.gravetyemanor.co.uk/sites/default/files/press-release/country_life_magazine.pdf

http://graphics.berkeley.edu/papers/Bousseau-GPI-2013-02/Bousseau-GPI-2013-02.pdf

http://www.computationalcreativity.net/iccc2016/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/6_Visual-Hallucination-For-Computational-Creation.pdf

http://www.pc.rhul.ac.uk/staff/J.Zanker/papers/2004_riloids_comp_SPATVIS.pdf

https://www.wired.com/2013/09/can-a-computer-algorithm-paint-like-a-human/

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/digital-art/

https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-20/edition-2/personality-and-art

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/0580/d548fbddb4082fb79bf8197b44b807f5e98c.pdf

http://emptyeasel.com/2007/07/13/an-explanation-of-impressionism-manet-monet-and-other-impressionists/

https://www.thoughtco.com/impressionism-art-history-183262

http://www.laexhibitmuseum.org/museum-history/lsem-fresco/

https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Joukowsky_Institute/courses/mediterraneanbronzeage/files/3620616.pdf

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/0910/RSL/Richardt.pdf

https://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/courses/CG2/SS2002/NPR.pdf

http://www.newliturgicalmovement.org/2010/06/characteristics-of-fresco.html#.WQWc4PQrK00

https://www.esdm.co.uk/aps