The component input on our TV is mixing the colours up - I’d noticed this when I got my Xbox360, but since I was connecting it via VGA, I wasn’t that bothered. Then I realised that when I pick up a Wii, I’ll be connecting that via component, and since I’d paid £1000 for the TV, it bloody better work, so an Engineer was dispatched.

This is when I realised that the guy sent to fix my TV didn’t see the difference between a composite and a component connection. Then I remembered someone posing a similar question on an art forum. Could it really be that hard to understand? I explained it to the TV guy, then thought “Hmm, thats was easy, and might make a useful post…”

Lots of people will have consoles that aren’t displaying their games as well as they could be, so I’ve written this to try to help.

Firstly, the most simple thing I can do is just list te connections in order of quality

1. RF/Coaxial
2. Composite
3. Svideo
4. Component (on a Standard-Def TV)
5. RGB Scart (Mainly European)
6. Component (on a Hi-Def TV)
7. VGA
8. HDMI/DVI

The most simple thing you can do is look at your TV to see what connections it accepts, and then you connect your console using an appropriate cable. If you’ve simply read this far and done that, you’ve probably got the best connection you can get. If you want to know WHY some connections are better than others, then read on…

So why are some better than others? It’s really all down to compression, and a lot of that has it roots in television broadcasting.

A video signal contains quite a lot of information - you are sending 50 or so different images every second. These are made up of 3 signals: Red, Green and Blue. With connections like VGA, DVI and HDMI you are sending just that - the RGB signal (along with other information, such as sync rates and perhaps digital audio). HDMI and DVI are both digital signals, which gives you best quality picture you can have since the signal is pure and unaltered.

The VGA connection also sends an RGB signal, however it gets converted to an analogue signal, then back to digital, so you have already introduced a conversion, and therefore you can lose a little clarity.

However, this is a lot of information to transmit, especially over the airwaves (and these signals have their root in TV broadcasting), so over time various methods of compression were used to be able to broadcast them more effectively. The signals get compressed to a faster method for transmission, and then they get reassembled when they are received.

Component, which has a red, a green and a blue cable doesn’t actually carry a pure RGB signal, which is pretty misleading. The Green cable carries a black and white signal, and the Red and Blue cables carry a mix of the colour. The signal gets converted to this efficient format, is transmitted along the cable and then it gets reassembled at the other end. It looks very good, but not quite as good as a pure RGB signal.

Svideo takes the same approach, but goes one step further with the two colour signals - it combines then into one, leaving you with one colour signal and one black and white signal, which is yet another step down, but it is still better than composite…

Composite is the next step down in quality, because it combines all the video signal into one wire (usually yellow). The other two cables (Red and White) carry left and right audio. Yup, 2 cables for audio and one for the picture.

The worst of the lot is RF/Coaxial which hasn’t been on a console for years, would still find it is the default on your SNES or Megadrive. It takes all that video information, and all the audio and compresses it into one tiny cable. This is also the same system most televisions have used for years.

Finally RGB SCART, mainly used only in Europe. I left it to the end cos it throws a bit of a spanner in the works depending on your TV. SCART is type of connector that allows different signals to be sent across it - composite, svideo, RGB and stereo sound. So in theory it should be better than component since it transmits RGB, and it is on standard definition TVs, but not on Hi-Def.

• Five simple steps to better typography : Journal : Mark Boulton
  (tags: typography Mark Boulton fonts Design)

Hawken King has updated his site, http://www.dadako.com/ in what I consider to be one of the smartest new looks that I have seen in a long time.

I may have to steal some ideas.

Yes, I’ve posted this image before, but I’d ve been busy at work and had nothing new to say.

This tutorial is aimed at newcomers to modelling. It partially discusses a problem that I call “square modeling”. This is where a significant number of the polygons in a model are (nearly) perfect squares. I’m not taking about quads - they have 4 sides and 4 corners, but this doesn’t mean they are square.

Use it or lose it

Often when you start modeling you end up using more polygons than you need to define a shape, and you keep a lot of square edges. The most common mistakes that newcomers make is to create another row of edges (known as a loop) just to define a corner on one area of a mesh. The other new vertices and egdes that were created are not used to define the shape of the model, so in effect they are being wasted.

I must stress that sometimes leaving these extra polygons is a good idea - either for better use of textures when UV mapping, or for better lighting results. However, in most cases this extra geometry can be removed, or used to define more shape.

If its there, use it.

The tutorial

This is a very short and simple tutorial showing how I often see shape definition being done inefficiently, and describes a more elegant method. It deals SOLELY with shaping without excess geometry.

This tutorial is also aimed SOLELY at static parts of a model, not areas with joints that should deform. Joints are a case when keeping or adding geometry is very useful.

The pipe

Firstly, lets get a simple shape with some angles on it. I’ve drawn a very simple pipe that has a slight kink in it, and a then surrounded it with a cube to block out the shape.

The initial sketch.	The initial sketch with a box surrounding the extents.

Method one

Now that we have the basic box, lets make the shape.

Firstly, here is the way I often see it being done - the modeller looks at each angle individually, without considering the shape as a whole. Since they consider each angle individually, they construct each angle individually.

The modeler creates a new row of edges for every angle on the object. There are 2 angles at each side (2 sides shown), making 4 new rows of edges.	Once the loops are created the vertices are pulled into shape.

The model looks correct, and works perfectly. However, there are more polygons there than need to be. Only part of the geometry is used to define the overall shape, and some parts simply do nothing - the look like big squares. This is “square modeling”.

If you look at bottom left section of the second image above, you can see 4 vertices in a perfect vertical line. The middle 2 are serving no purpose. These are wasted. Where edges meet at 180 degrees, the connecting vert is often unnecessary - either give it a purpose of defining some shape, or simply remove it.

Method two

Lets have a look at another method to build the same shape, this time considering the shape as a whole, looking at volumes of mass.

I create a new loop for every PAIR OF ADJACENT angles on the object. There are 2 angles at each side, so that is 2 new rows of edges, not 4 as before.	Once the new rows of edges are created the vertices are pulled into shape.

The first thing to note is that the model also looks correct - it is exactly the same shape as before. However, there are less polygons than the first method. How many? Lets work it out.

We’ll have to make some assumptions:

• The pipe has no ends
• The pipe has 4 sides
• 1 quad = 2 polygons

The maths part

In the first method, there were 5 rows, or 5 loops of quads. The pipe has 4 sides.

4 sides * 5 sections of quads * 2 (to convert quads to triangles) = 40 triangles/polygons.

In the second method, there were 3 sections, or 3 loops of quads.

4 sides * 3 sections of quads * 2 (to convert quads to triangles) = 24 triangles/polygons.

Method 2 uses almost HALF the number of polygons that method 1 uses.

This was a very simple tutorial based on a simple feature - a pipe - yet the same method works perfectly well on characters. With characters it can provoke a more organic flow.

Points to note

As mentioned at the start, this tutorial is aimed SOLELY at static parts of model, not areas with joints that should deform. When you have a join, such as an elbow or a knee, you need to have those extra rows (loops). If you don’t have them, the model will collapse horribly during animation.

With some models, adding the extra geometry used in the first method will make the model much easier to UVmap, and may improve lighting - squares provide a better generic surface to calculate light and shadow over as they are based on 2 identical triangles.

“Rick, how do you paint metal?”, “Rick, where have all the texture tutorials gone?”

Well Jimmy, the truth is that it’s been a long time since I wrote any, and my old ones are out of date. Fortunately I blatantly stole this link to Skinning Tuts earlier. So read it and learn something new. Incidentally, these days I do a lot of skinning, and by that I mean binding a model to a skeletal rig. That is something I probably could write a tutorial on - but with deadlines and holidays and then the long run up to the release of our next game, I’ll pass on that for now.