Compressing Digital Illustrative Art for Mobile Games by Means of 2D Triangle Meshes
Olivier Hokke · Research Repository (Delft University of Technology) · 2020
Many games played on the mobile phone have become large in download size. A significant portion thereof is due to the many textures that are involved. However, many games have art styles that include clean drawings with gradients, solid colors, and hard lines. We observe that these images’ areas may be more efficiently described by interpolating colors between a few points rather than storing large amounts of pixels. Conventional vectorization techniques and vector to mesh conversions result in complex meshes with extensive collections of points or are not very well suited to be used directly for games. We present a recipe of a set of methods that form an efficient compression technique by converting raster images directly into 2D meshes and storing these efficiently in binary. The user may define the quality of the final mesh, by, for instance, allowing the algorithm more time to converge and setting the desired vertex count. Other advantages include better scalability and fast in-game render times since texture lookups are not required, and color interpolation is GPU hardware accelerated.