Animation Glossary - T and U

Tej Kohli animation glossary, words starting with T and U.

Texture : A bitmap image that is applied to the surface of 3D object to give it detail. Texture maps may be either photographic images or procedural textures, and may be applied in each of the material channels of an object using a variety of mapping or projection methods.

Three-Point Lighting : A system of CG lighting derived from real-world cinematography, in which a scene is illuminated by three light sources: a Key light, which acts as the primary source of illumination for the scene; a Fill light, which illuminates shadow areas; and a Rim light, which illuminates the edges of objects and helps them stand out from the background.

Tiling : The process of duplicating a texture across the surface of an object. Tiling textures must be created so that the edge of one aligns perfectly with that of its neighbour, otherwise the result is a series of ugly seams. Highfrequency textures are those in which patterns repeat at short intervals over an object’s surface; low-frequency textures are those in which the intervals are larger.

Timeline : A fundamental element of the graphical user interface of most modern 3D software packages which shows the timing of the keyframes in a sequence of animation. Playback of the animation may be controlled either by a series of VCR-like controls, or by clicking and dragging with the mouse to ‘scrub’ a slider to and fro along the timeline.

Trimming : The process by which NURBS surfaces are edited. The trimming tools allow 3D artists to define areas on a NURBS surface that will be made invisible and not render out, even though their CVs still exist. Separate trimmed surfaces may be joined together by using a variety of techniques, including Attaching, Aligning, Filleting and Stitching.

UV Texture Co-ordinates : The co-ordinate system used for assigning textures to polygonal models. Since UV co-ordinate space is two-dimensional, one of several projection methods must be used to ‘unwrap’ the UVs from the model and lay them flat on a plane. Once unwrapped, the UV map may be screengrabbed and exported to a paint package for texture painting.

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