List of related terms used in the games industry for creating 3D art.
| Term | Description | Related Links |
|---|---|---|
Albedo | Simply the diffuse of a material. With PBR this is the scientific term for diffuse. | |
Alpha | Alpha is a technique in 3D computer graphics involving the use of texture mapping to designate the amount of transparency/translucency of areas in a certain object. | |
Ambient occlusion or AO | Shading and rendering technique used to calculate how exposed each point in a scene is to ambient lighting | |
Bake | The process of transferring data from one asset to another. Usually used in terms of baking high poly info to low poly info | |
Bump map | A black and white image to explain height difference in the surface. For games this has been replaced by Normal maps. | |
Cage | Needs Description | |
Cavity | ||
Color map | Another name for Albedo | |
Curvature | ||
DCC | Digital Content Creation. For example: modo, max, Maya, and blender. | |
Displacement | ||
Drawcalls | How many objects are being drawn to the screen. | |
Fuzz | ||
Global Illumination | A system that models how light is bounced off of surfaces onto other surfaces (indirect light) rather than being limited to just the light that hits a surface directly from a light source (direct light). | |
Gloss | ||
GPU | Graphics Processing Unit aka your video card. | |
Mask | ||
Metalness | A texture map that tells you if a pixel is metal or not. Think in black or white. | |
Normal | Needs Description | |
Opacity | ||
PBR | Physically based rendering. | |
QA | Quality assurance also known in some cases as a tester. | |
Roughness | Quantified by the deviations in the direction of the normal vector of a real surface from its ideal form. If these deviations are large, the surface is rough; if they are small, the surface is smooth. | |
Specular | ||
Tech Art | Technical Artist | |
Translucency | ||
Transmission |