VECTOR ART

Vector art is an exciting digital art format that creates images using mathematical points, angles and shapes. Unlike raster art that uses pixel based graphics to create images, vector art does not degrade when it is enlarged. Artists have been given a tool that allows them to be extreamly precise and creative at the same time.

Vector graphics (also called geometric modeling or object-oriented graphics) is the use of geometrical primitives such as points, lines, curves, and polygons, which are all based upon mathematical equations to represent images in computer graphics .

Vector graphics is an alternative to raster graphics, which is the representation of images as a collection of pixels, as is typically used for the representation of photographic images Most computer displays translate vector representations of an image to a raster format. The drawing software is used for creating and editing vector graphics. The image can be changed by editing these objects. They can be stretched, twisted, coloured, and so on with a series of tools. The raster image containing a value for every pixel on the screen is stored in memory. Starting in the earliest days of computing in the 1950s and into the 1980s, a different type of display, the vector graphics system, was used. In these “calligraphic” systems the electron beam of the CRT display monitor was steered directly to trace out the shapes required, line segment by line segment, with the rest of the screen remaining black. This process was repeated many times a second (”stroke refresh”) to achieve a flicker-free or near flicker-free picture. These systems allowed very high-resolution line art and moving images to be displayed without the (for that time) unthinkably huge amounts of memory that an equivalent-resolution raster system would have needed, and allowed entire subpictures to be moved, rotated, blinked, etc. by modifying only a few words of the graphic data. These vector-based monitors were also known as X-Y displays.

Advantages to this style of drawing over raster graphics:

• This minimal amount of information translates to a much smaller file size compared to large raster images (the size of representation doesn’t depend on the dimensions of the object), though a vector graphic with a small file size is often said to lack detail compared with a real world photo.
• Correspondingly, one can indefinitely zoom in on e.g. a circle arc, and it remains smooth. On the other hand, a polygon representing a curve will reveal being not really curved.
• On zooming in, lines and curves need not get wider proportionally. Often the width is either not increased or less than proportional. On the other hand, irregular curves represented by simple geometric shapes may be made proportionally wider when zooming in, to keep them looking smooth and not like these geometric shapes.
• The parameters of objects are stored and can be later modified. This means that moving, scaling, rotating, filling etc. doesn’t degrade the quality of a drawing. Moreover, it is usual to specify the dimensions in device independent units, which results in the best possible rasterization on raster devices.
• From a 3-D perspective, rendering shadows is also much more realistic with vector graphics, as shadows can be abstracted into the rays of light which form them. This allows for photo realistic images and renderings.

Vector art is key for printing. Since the art is made from a series of mathematical curves it will print very crisp even when resized. For instance one can take the same vector logo and print it on a business card, and then enlarge it to billboard size and keep the same crisp quality. A low-resolution raster graphic would blur incredibly if it were enlarged from business card size to billboard size.

Formats:One example of vector graphics format is SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), an open standard created and developed by the World Wide Web Consortium to address the need (and attempts of several corporations) for a versatile, scriptable and all-purpose vector format for the web and otherwise. Another example is VML, a proposed standard that was adopted by Microsoft .*Source: Wikipedia