Application Glossary
Compiled by Roland Hess
Although most 3D applications share functionality, the terms used to refer to different tools and
procedures can vary from program to program. Here you will find several items and procedures
in Blender that use names that may not be familiar to you. We've listed them by their more
generic names and added a short description and a page number in this book where you can learn
more about it.
Also, Blender has an extensive set of importers and exporters to help it fit right into your existing
work flow (.3ds, .obj, .lwo, COLLADA, DirectX). Just look at the Import and Export items in the
main File menu to see the entire list.
Animation Blocks/Curve Blocks/Tracks: A set of curves for an object or skeleton bones that
are grouped together and visualized as a single piece of animation. Blender term "Action" 201
Curves/Animation Curves: The visualization of the interpolation between key frames. Often
shown as Bezier curves, but can usually be interpolated in ways as well. Blender term "Ipo
Curves" 58, 76
Depth Mapped Shadows/Shadow Maps: Using a pre-calculated depth map to render shadows,
as opposed to ray tracing. Blender term: "Buffered Shadows" 268, 275
Deformers: Functions attached to objects that accomplish live effects, such as smoothing,
subdivision surfacing, array duplication, Booleans and displacement. Blender term "Mesh
Modifiers" 84
Directional/Direct Light: This lamp type casts parallel light rays. Blender term: "Sun Lamp"
264, 274
Graph/Curve Editor: An editing screen that allows you to directly manipulate the animation
curves and keys of an object. Blender term: "Ipo Editor" 58
Hair and Fur: Blender term: "Strand Particles" 296, 309
Maps: Some 3D packages refer modules and images that vary colors and settings across
materials as "Maps." Blender term: "Textures" 234
Non-linear Animation/Trax Editor/Motion Mixer: An editing screen that allows you to blend
different sets of animation data, as well as to see, adjust and freely rearrange blocks of animation
data. Blender term "NLA Editor" 140
Null Objects: Used as reference points, placeholders and assistants when building complex
animations, these objects do not show up in renders and usually have limited object attributes.
Blender term "Empty" 52
Omni/Point Light: This lamp type casts light in all directions at once. Blender term: "Lamp"
274
Paint Deform: This is a method of "painting" on a mesh to push and pull faces and vertices
along their normals. Several packages have full-blown sculpt modeling interfaces, and this
functionality falls under that heading. Blender term: "Sculpting"113
Scripting/Plug-ins: The use of an embedded scripting language and pre-written plug-ins to
expand the functionality of the program. Blender uses Python as its embedded scripting language.
360
Shape Animation/Morph Targets/Mesh Targets: The process of causing a mesh to reshape
itself into a different form by modeling the different shapes and interpolating between them.
Blender term: "Shape Keys" 194, 203
Skeletons: A construction of bones used for character animation. Blender term "Armature" 154
Sky Light/Hemisphere Lamp: This usually refers to the effect seen with lighting that mimics a
cloudy day, i.e. no directional light, but general illumination and shading where objects are nearer
to each to other. Blender term: "Ambient Occlusion" 271, 277
Soft Selection/Selection Falloff: The ability to transform selected portions of a mesh and have
the transformation also affect non-selected vertices (or edges and faces) to create a smoother
transformation. Blender term: "Proportional Editing" 89
UVW/Unwrapping: The process of assigning texturing coordinates to faces of a model. Blender
term: "UV Unwrapping" 244, 253
Widget: Graphic elements that can be grabbed by the mouse and manipulated on-screen to
transform (translate, rotate, scale) objects. Blender term: "Transformation Manipulator" 49