What I’ve read online says that Vector art uses math to make the image scale better but isn’t ‘math’ used in Pixel art in, say, Photoshop as well? I’m having trouble wrapping my head around how the math might be different when creating a line in Photoshop vs Illustrator for example.
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Vectors graphics are described as a sequence of lines (vectors) to draw. The vectors are arbitrary and can be located anywhere in image with infinite precision.
Pixel (Bitmap) graphics are described as coloured dots in a grid. The grid size is fixed when the image is created.
Our modern screens use pixels innately and this means that to see a vector image, you need to transform it into a bitmap image. To do so, you need to decide which dots need to get turn on to display a given line. Imagine getting out a piece of grid paper and drawing a line on it. To turn it into a bitmap, you would have to decide which cells in the grid to fill in to display the line. One solution is to completely fill in all of the cells which the line passes through, which is easy to do from a visual perceptive, but a computer would need to do a lot of math to figure out. There are several different algorithms used to do this, and they different in how fast they run and how good the line looks when displayed.
Now, imagine we drew exactly the same line but a different sized grid. If we use a smaller gird the image will have more dots in it, scaling it up. This will create an image with a closer approximation of the lines in our vector image. If we do the opposite and using a larger grid to scale down the image, we get a worse approximation of the lines.
Lets take one of the bitmaps produced above and change it’s scale. Generally speaking, the image isn’t going to change much as you scale up. It will turn into larger and larger set of coloured squares in the same shape as the original. Now, there are algorithms to smooth out the squares to make the image look better, but it won’t be able to recreate the original line. The algorithms cannot really create new data that wasn’t in the original bitmap.
When you draw a line in Photoshop, you are just indicating which dots in the grid are which colour. In Illustration, you get an actual line.
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