nderstanding of physics can be very helpful and even necessary to achieving good results. This perhaps most evident in game design and movie animations where you are literally simulating reality, everything from a character being able to walk, run and jump to simulating fire, fog and smoke to various lighting effects (being able to realistically simulate light is critical in digital art). Physics plays a direct roll in determining the behavior of rigid and soft body simulations (so that a rock acts like a rock, a foot is soft as it should be and when a virtual foot steps on a virtual rock everything looks and behaves the way the viewer expects), cloth and fluid dynamics (so that clothes hang correctly from the body of blow realistically in the wind; and flowing streams or drops of rain behave the way they should), as well as more exciting things like explosions, guns and space ships. Game designers and even animators have to consider physics when doing any of these things.
But physics helps the digital artist in other ways as well. While chemistry helps us understand why things are the color they are, physics helps us understand how light affects color. This is especially true for translucent objects like skin (and both biology and chemistry help us understand just how many things are actually translucent). To make skin seem more realistic we need to simulate the way light penetrates into skin before being reflected back. This is done in digital virtual art using a technique called Subsurface scattering. Ironically the same math used to calculate this in 3D rendering software is very similar to the math used by particle physicists to predict the behavior of sub atomic particle. But that’s because light is made up of photons, and to get a realistic appearance you are literally simulating sub atomic particles. Particle physics is also used to simulate things like fire, smoke and fog in 3D animations and virtual reality. There’s a lot of physics behind the latest computer games we play and if you want to create games like them you’ll need to understand physics.
Even more important than Physics to digital art is Mathematics. If you aren’t doing game design or virtual reality simulations physics might not be quite as important to you, but there’s no escaping the importance of math. Digital art is math, literally. You might use software to paint a picture, but the software itself is using some complex math to make it happen. What is more important to the digital artist is how math can be directly utilized to create amazing results. Perhaps the best example of this are what are known as procedural textures. When you create digital art, whether it be a virtual avatar or just a 2D web graphic you’ll be using various images called “textures” to paint with, and these are made up of repeating patterns. It might be a cloth texture applied to a virtual pair of blue jeans, or it might be a Victorian wallpaper print in an art piece, or it might be a subtle skin texture applied to a virtual avatar. In some cases rather than using a source image it is easier and faster to use a procedural texture, and procedural textures are made using math. By using various math formula you can create remarkably complex patterns of color and shapes. One good example is software called Filter Forge, which is an application specifically for creating procedural textures. Using math and software like Filter Forge you can create patterns of brick and cobblestone, or fish scales, or chain mail, or walls of thorny vines and many other shapes. These are not made from pictures, but rather they are pictures made with math that can be amazingly realistic. Digital artist use them to quickly “skin” or “texture” a virtual brick building with bricks an mortar and a variety of other uses. The formula’s to create these textures are mostly algebra.
If you want to create 3D models you will also use math in doing so. Geometry in particular will end up being very important because that’s exactly what a 3D mesh is, geometry. Educators should be aware that future digital artis