Creating 3D Icons

[Witis]

Hi dilettante, thanks for the reply, I downloaded version 1.6 of IcoFx (chargeless version) from the net, as the brush icon graphic looks quite nice, however, after I imported an equivalent quality graphic 256x256 using true colour + alpha blending (which worked) and then I tried to draw a circle using their circle tool it became clear that there is a large difference in the resolution of the imported icon and the graphics that can be created by the icon package, which is the reason for this thread. I did not even try to add any effects. I am left wondering if the icon for IcoFx was even created by itself.

All of these higher quality graphics and effects seem to involve higher resolutions per metric i.e. more pixels or dots per inch (PPI/DPI). Thus an icon 0.5 x 0.5 inches constructed on a much higher DPI/PPI system will give a much clearer, and more detailed result. At least this is how the bitmap format seems to function.

Windows has used a default PPI (Pixels Per Inch) of 96, while Apple has used a default of 72 PPI (windows having 1/3 more PPI). This meant that a 10 point font on an Apple used 10 pixels where as the same 10 point font used 13 pixels (approx 1/3 more) in windows making the fonts appear more detailed in Windows. Although this also depended on the screen resolution being capable of displaying at 96 PPI. If the screen resolution was only 72 PPI the Microsoft fonts appeared larger taking up 1/3 more screen real estate than the Apple fonts.

So the key to higher quality graphics, at least from a bitmap perspective, seems to involve getting to more PPI from the OS together with a higher res screen (leaving to one side the issue that in some graphical systems the pixels only store one of their RGB values and the image then has to be interpolated or demosaiced resulting in lower resolutions for the same PPI). As the smallest sized monitors with 1920x1080 pixels actually have a higher PPI than larger monitors with the same number of pixels an image that is free of any blocky pixelation on a 32" 1920x1080 screen might appear blocky and low res on a 50" 1920x1080 screen.

The other issue is the number of bits of data that is used to describe the colour value from 4bit(16 colours) to true colour where 1 btye is used for each of the RGB values or 256x256x256 =16,777,216 colours (humans can only discriminate approx 10 million colours) and a fourth byte is used for the alpha channel (transparency value). Thus the bits per pixel describes the colour potential of an image.

The next issue is the ability to resize an image upwards or downwards. If raster graphics (bitmaps) are used a 48x48 pixel image, although it will scale to say 128x128 pixels and display an enlarged version of the graphic, will nonetheless appear to lose resolution and become pixelated and blurry. By contrast vector graphics are founded on points, lines, curves, and shapes such as polygons, which are then rendered to scale allowing for the resolution to be maintained regardless of the image size meaning the image only has to be created once with a vector editing package, where as a raster graphic would have to be recreated for each display size which sounds exhausting.

"Raster-based image editors, such as Painter, Photoshop, MS Paint, and GIMP, revolve around editing pixels, unlike vector-based image editors, such as Xfig, CorelDRAW, Adobe Illustrator, or Inkscape, which revolve around editing lines and shapes (vectors)" source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raster_graphics

SVG or Scalable Vector Graphics is the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) standard.
OpenOffice.org Draw can export SVG graphics.
Other options are listed here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...aphics_editors

Most of the current browser support SVG with the exception of MS Internet explorer version 8 and below which can in most cases be hacked to render SVG using the google frame plugin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrome_Frame. IE9 supports SVG natively.

So the large change in GFX appears to be the development or redevelopment of vector graphics which appears to be what I should be looking at now rather than my old pixel based raster tools.