Indeed in the very early days of graphics, textures were expensive and wherever possible would be skipped to just paint simple colours on the objects. This is reasonably common knowledge, and especially if you've seen realtime 3D graphics grow from its infancy 20 years ago you will know just how much more sophisticated today's models are. Then these models will be placed into the world in a level editor to slowly build up the virtual city. When building a game, there are artists who are constructing these models in a 3D modelling package, and creating all the resources needed. Each object in the scene, or perhaps a group of related objects, will be built separately as a Textured model. Within these intermediate images, each is built out of yet smaller pieces.

There is innovation and new work happening at finer grained levels, but when you hear marketing talking up some great new feature - this is usually the kind of thing they will be talking about. This is the kind of area where graphics research and new techniques are being developed all the time. In this series I'm not going to necessarily cover every single image used in the Watch Dogs frame, but I'll touch on the main ones that can teach us something. Some of the intermediate images used when constructing our Watch Dogs frame. Elsewhere she might want to have proper reflections on the car the player is driving, and this will require another image for reflections. For example she will want to make sure the sunlight casts proper shadows - this will require one type of image for shadows. These images will differ a lot from engine to engine and it will depend on what techniques the graphics programmer is trying to accomplish. The graphics engine will draw many intermediate images of different types to help it to calculate the final image, before finally layering up the frame you see on your screen. This used to be the case many years ago, but modern graphics engines will almost always do some kind of early processing. The final image you see is not immediately drawn. There are a few ways in which a frame is constructed out of smaller building blocks. Also, there are several new shiny pictures. In this part - as with most of the time - we're going to look at just one frame, and talk about the building blocks that a game uses to create the final frame.

Flat tf2 textures