3D Vocabulary

Active

The last selected object is the "Active" object. This is important when parenting objects together, or when copying properties from one object to another or to several others.

Albedo

The color texture of a material, without any baked in shadow information.

All-quads

In some pipelines, a model which is all-quads is desired. This means that the model has only Faces that have 4 Vertices and 4 Edges, so no triangles or N-gons (Faces with more than 4 Vertices or Edges). This can be necessary for various reasons. For example, a quad-based model tends to deform better when animated, works more predictably with Subdivision Surface smoothing, and can be used more readily for a sculpting pass where detail is added. It's also easier to mix materials using only Vertex Painting, when a model has evenly distributed quad topology.

Alpha

The texture that gives the information about which parts of a material should be transparent.

Area Light

Area Lights are a type of light that is characterised by having a shape (as opposed to being just a point). For example, they can be a rectangle, or a disc. This is useful when simulating light coming from a TV screen or a window. Area Lights give softer shadows than point lights.

Armature

The (non-spooky) skeleton of your 3D character. The Armature consists of "bones" that can be posed in Pose Mode, and animated with keyframes. The character mesh is parented to the Armature using weight painting.

Asset

Things like models, materials, brushes, that can be re-used. They can be stored in the Asset Browser.

Backface Culling

The hiding of Faces that are facing away from the camera.

Baking

Things such as fluid simulations, lighting, rigid body simulations can be heavy to calculate in real-time. In order to make it easier to continue working on scenes containing such elements, or to make rendering go faster, it's a good idea to pre-compute them. This pre-computing is called baking. Typically, simulations are baked to keyframes, after which they can be played back smoothly. Baking is also a term used to describe the converting of materials to distinct PBR-textures, which are a standard system of texture maps used in game engines. Complex shader set-ups which can not be exported are "baked" to images that combine to give the same result, but are easy to export and use in other software packages.

Bevel

The various ways of making corners of an object less sharp.

BNPR

Short for Blender Non-Photorealistic Rendering. This usually means rendering styles such as toon shading, or anime-style rendering. Literally it means anything which is not intended to be photorealistic.

Boolean

The technique of cutting into objects using other objects (or adding them in a way that fuses them).

Boundary Box

The simplest representation of a 3D object, usually meant for making the viewport more efficient. Once the rendering starts, the actual full detail object will be used instead of the bounding box.

Box mapping

If you want to add a texture to an object which is not UV-unwrapped, you can do so with "Triplanar" mapping. This simply projects the texture on the object from 3 planes (hence, tri-planar): x, y and z. Then, there is some blending where they meet so there is no sharp visible seam. In Blender, this is called "Box mapping". It is achieved by choosing the "Box" Projection type in the Image Texture node, and setting a Blend value. Usually the Blend-value is pretty low, like 0.1 or 0.2, depending on what looks good.

Box Modeling

The workflow of starting with a box, and adding more and more detail to it based on reference images, until you get the desired shape. A very old school method.

Bump map

A Bump map is a texture that adds fake height detail to a material, without the need for additional geometry. Any black and white image can be used.

Cap

The "lid" on for example a Cylinder. When creating a Cylinder primitive, you can choose: no cap (there will be a hole on either end of the Cylinder), or an N-gon cap.

Child

The object that is parented to another object (it's "parent"). It will follow the transformations done to the Parent object. You can parent objects by selecting both and pressing Ctrl+P.

Color Depth

The amount of colors used in an image file. Most images you see on the internet are 8-bit, as that's enough for our eyes. But when an image has to represent height detail, such as for a Displacement texture, 16-bit or even 32-bit may be preferable to prevent a stair stepping artefact.

Crease

Instead of adding more geometry to make edges of an object sharper (so-called "support loops" or "boundary protection"), we can also just select those Edges and "Crease" them. This tells any subdivision surface modifier, that those Edges need to remain sharp. This is done by selecting the Edges, and pressing Shift+E+ a numerical value, 1 being the highest. Alternatively you can do this in the Option panel, in Edit Mode in the Item tab with the Mean Crease value.

Cycles

The render engine in Blender used for photorealistic renders. It's much slower than Eevee, but the results are often better.

Depth of Field

The area in which objects are sharp / in focus, as opposed to blurry / out of focus. This is created in the Camera settings by enabling Depth of Field and choosing an object to focus on, and adjusting the F-Stop value.

Diffuse

Another name for the color texture of a material.

Displacement map

The texture that adds height detail to an object through its material. Contrary to the Bump or Normal map, this texture does require additional geometry (usually supplied with a Subdivision modifier) to work.

Edge

the connection between two Vertices. Connect 3 Edges in a triangle and you have... a triangle. You're on your way to making a 3D model!

Edge Loop

an Edge or connected loop of Edges that goes all the way from one side to another, or in a loop around an object. Add an Edge Loop in Edit Mode with Ctrl+R.

Eevee

A render engine in Blender that's quite fast, but less photorealistic than Cycles, the other render engine.

EXR

EXR or OpenEXR is a file format, that very efficiently stores images with high Bit Depth, so it's useful for Height Maps that need a lot of colours to avoid visual artefacts when displacing geometry. EXR files can even store several layers of an image, so you can render separate passes to one EXR file and then separate them again in your compositing software of choice.

Extrude

The technique of creating a 3-dimensional extrusion from a 2-dimensional selection (for example, a selection of one Face). The shortcut for extruding is E.

Face

One of the building blocks of a 3D object, a Face is the space that fills up connected Edges and Vertices.

Fields

Fields are specific nodes in the Geometry Nodes workspace, that are a piece of code that you can use again and again. Nodes with a diamond input socket, can accept input from fields.

Geometry

The arrangement of Vertices, Edges and Faces that make up an object. "It has a lot of geometry" for example can mean that a model has a lot of Vertices.

Geometry Nodes

In Blender, you have "modifiers" that do things to your objects, for example add subdivisions to them. With Geometry Nodes, you can create your own modifier. This is done by using nodes in the Geometry Node Editor, after adding a Geometry Nodes modifier to an object.

Global Illumination

When rendering, the way light bounces and illuminates objects in a realistic manner is called Global Illumination. Without it, it looks a lot less realistic. The first movie to use this technique? Why, it was Shrek 2.

GPU

The processor on your graphics card. When rendering with GPU, it's often faster than with CPU (the processor of your computer). However, GPU often has memory limits for textures, that the CPU doesn't have.

Hard Surface model

Any kind of non-organic model. Often used when talking about stuff like robots, weapons and other metal objects. But a chair is also a hard-surface object (unless it's a particularly soft and squishy chair...).

HDRI

A High Dynamic Range Image. Basically, a photograph that contains multiple exposures. From under to overexposed. The render engine then uses what it needs from that image for lighting a scene, leading to more realism.

Height map

The same as a Displacement map.

Low-Poly modeling

A 3D model that makes the most of very limited amount of Faces, or even triangles. In some cases, the low-poly nature of the model may be part of its design and charm. Low-poly objects may be a requirement of certain videogames.

Matcap

MatCap (short for Material Capture) is a way of quickly and easily applying a material and lighting set-up to your scene. This is done by loading a spherical image that contains all this material and lighting information. MatCaps are useful when sculpting, as they often show the shape and its lumpy surfaces more clearly than the normal grey solid viewport mode does.

Material

The properties contained in one or more nodes, that make up the look of a 3D object. Materials can (but don't have to) use image textures, or procedural textures. Also called a "shader".

Mesh

A construction that consists of Vertices, Edges, and Faces. A 3D model, essentially!

Mudbox

Mudbox is software that is dedicated to 3D sculpting (and painting). It was developed during production of the Lord of the Rings movies to speed up the sculpting process. It was sold to Autodesk in 2007. Unfortunately, updates of the software are very underwhelming, with the 2025 version having just one bug fix, after years of waiting for new features. So, kind of the opposite of Blender in that sense. However, Mudbox is really easy and fun to use for sculpting and painting, and it boasts a great layer-system. This makes the sculpting process in Mudbox more non-destructive. Definitely worth a try, and not that expensive at 100 USD per year or 15 dollars per month. So if you love high resolution 3D sculpting, you may want to try it.

N-gon

A Face made up of more than 4 Vertices or Edges.

Nodes

Nodes are what make up a material (for example an Image Texture node, that contains an image texture), or a geometry nodes modifier, or a compositing set-up. It's a visual representation of how data is processed. Nodes usually contain input and output sockets, to connect them together.

Noise

Procedurally generated noise can be used instead of an image texture, to create patterns or detail in a material. This is done with a Noise texture.

Normal map

Similar to a Bump map, a Normal map adds fake height detail to a material, without the need for additional geometry. It's a colourful image that is created by baking the detail from a high-resolution model to a low-poly model.

Normals

The direction a Face is pointing in. This is important for how the shadows are displayed on an object, especially for non-photoreal renders like toon shaders.

NURBS

A different way of creating 3D objects, instead of Faces made up of Vertices and Edges, it calculates the curved surface connecting those points. Which gives an infinitely smooth surface. It's less used nowadays.

Octane render

A third-party render engine which also has a version for Blender. The Blender version actually consists of a separate build of Blender.

OpenVDB

A file format that can store things like explosions, clouds and other kinds of fluid simulations.

Organic modeling

The opposite of hard surface modeling: Everything that's soft and squishy, like humans and animals.

Orthographic

When there's absolutely no perspective, we talk of an orthographic view, or orthographic camera.

Parent

An object that is above another object (it's "child") that is parented to it. You can parent objects by selecting both and pressing Ctrl+P.

Particles

When simulating rain, dust, small debris, leaves falling from a tree and other such small objects in large quantities, particles are usually used. These are not much more than 3D coordinates following the rules set by a "Particle System", and replaced by a specified object (such as a model of a leaf) or a collection of objects, at render time.

PBR

PBR is short for Physically Based Rendering. It's usually used to talk about materials using a specific set of image textures that together achieve a photorealistic result: Some of these textures are Roughness, Albedo, Normal, Specularity, Height, Metalness.

Perspective

The 3D viewport has two modes: Perspective and Orthographic. Perspective means that things get smaller as they are further away, just like how we perceive things with our eyes. In the Option panel under View, you can adjust the Focal Length of the viewport "lens", if you want. If you want a completely Orthographic view, in other words a view without any perspective, press 5 on the Numpad. Pressing 5 toggles between Perspective and Orthographic mode.

Pivot Point

The Pivot Point of an object is the part relative to which it transforms, in other words relative to which it rotates and scales. This could be the Origin of the object (the small orange/yellow dot) but it could also be the 3D Cursor. You choose this from the Transform Pivot Point menu, which is located in the top / middle of the interface.

Planar

Making something "Planar" usually means making it perfectly flat. For example, if you have a surface that has some bumps caused by Vertices that are not exactly on the same plane as the other Vertices that make up that surface, you can make the surface "planar" by scaling flattening them. This can be done for example with the LoopTools menu in Edit Mode.

Plane

A Plane (in the context of Blender) is a flat mesh consisting of at least one Face. It's one of the Primitive mesh objects that you can add via the Add menu.

Point Cloud

A Point Cloud is a set of points in 3D space that make up a 3D object. Point Clouds are usually generated through photogrammetry or 3D scanning, after which they are stitched together into a surface.

Point Light

Point Lights are a type of light source in Blender that emit light in all directions.

Polygon

The same thing as a Face. In most other 3d software, people talk about polygons rather than Faces. Triangles, Faces and N-gons are all polygons.

Primitive

3D modeling software usually comes with "primitive objects", these are simple 3D objects such as a Cube, Sphere, Cylinder and so on. Typically a more complex model such as a tea pot is also included, however in Blender this is a monkey head instead. Using primitives you can quickly block out more complicated shapes.

Procedural

Procedural can stand for things that are created entirely by nodes, for example a procedural noise texture. The advantage of a procedural texture, is that there is no image file associated with it - it's just math. So you can't accidentally break a material by moving files and forgetting to move the texture associated with it. The downside, is that procedural textures look quite recogniseable.

Quads

Quads are Faces that contain 4 Vertices and 4 Edges, no more and no less. See also "All-quads"

Raytracing

Raytracing is a rendering method where a ray gets cast into the 3D scene, and the render engine looks at what the ray hits, in order to know what to show. This is a slow process, though recently there have been graphics cards like the nVidia Turing, that can do raytracing in real-time.

Refraction

Refraction is the way the light bends as it goes through a transparent material. This makes materials such as glass or water look more realistic.

Render Pass

Instead of rendering your image all in one go, you can split it up into several parts: For example the roughness, diffuse, depth and so on. Then you have more control over how they are combined later on, resulting in potentially a better final image.

Rendering

The process of creating images from your 3D scene, from the view of the virtual camera.

Resolution

How many horizontal and vertical pixels an image has is called its resolution.

Rigging

The process of preparing a model for animation, by adding a kind of virtual skeleton to it, which is called an Armature. An Armature consists of bones. The model is connected to these bones by a process called Weight Painting, which tells the bones how much influence they have over each part of the mesh.

Rigid Body Dynamics

When you want to simulate objects reacting to gravity, such as a pile of bricks crumbling down, that's typically done with Rigid Body Dynamics. Rigid Bodies are the objects that take an active part in the simulation. There are also objects that they can collide with, that don't move - these are considered passive rigid bodies.

Roughness

How shiny an object is, is determined by the Roughness channel of its material. This can be influenced by a simple value from 0 to 1 (0 being very shiny, 1 being non-shiny or "rough"). Or you can use a black and white texture to influence this more precisely.

Samples

As you render something, you'll see the image appear in a very rough, grainy form at first. These are the samples. The more samples, the more clearly defined and noise-free the image will be. And also, the longer it takes to render. You can make things a little faster by using denoising.

Seams

When you UV-unwrap something, you do so by marking Edges as "Seams". Think of it like taking scissors and cutting the 3D model in specific places, allowing you to flatten it.

Shader

Often used as a synonym for a material, but really a shader is the code that determines how the properties of a material are applied to a 3D object. People also talk about shaders when referring to materials that only use mathematical properties, such as procedural noise textures, and no image textures.

Simulation

Things like liquid, smoke, and objects reacting to gravity are usually done with simulations in 3D. This makes them move in a realistic way. Simulations tend to be quite processor intensive, and slow. So it makes sense to bake them after they've been calculated, so you can save the result as keyframes and don't have to run the simulation again.

Specular

A specific value of a shader that makes the material more shiny. However, this is in most cases a value you should leave alone. To make things more or less shiny, use the Roughness input instead.

Sphere

Spheres are one of the primitive objects that you can add to a scene. There's UV Spheres, which are convenient for mapping textures of planets for example, Icospheres, which are useful for things like particles, and Quad Spheres, which are good for subdividing and sculpting due to their evenly distributed quad topology.

Spotlight

A Spotlight is a specific light type in Blender that has a "cone" and a direction. You can make the edge of the spotlight projection hard or soft.

sRGB

Depending on what kind of monitor you use when working in Blender, you may need to choose a different display device in the Color Management options. However, most monitors use sRGB which is the default. If it's something else, that means you have a very expensive monitor and you probably know to change this setting. However Mac devices often have Display P3 as their display device.

Substance painter

A dedicated texture painting program. As such, it has many available texture brushes, and clever methods of quickly generating masks such as edge wear. It also has a big marketplace of user-made materials on places like Artstation. It has a monthly license from Adobe, but you can still buy the perpetual license on Steam. It just doesn't get updated after one year.

Subsurface Scattering

With organic stuff like skin, the light doesn't just bounce right off it, but goes a bit deeper and bounces around inside before being reflected back. This gives organic material its specific look. In Blender this is done with "subsurface scattering".

Taper or tapering

When an object becomes smaller in one direction, you can say that it "tapers" down. For example, a piramid tapers towards the top. If you use a SimpleDeform modifier, it can be set to taper your model.

Texture

An image file, that supplies visual information to the material of a 3D object. Materials usually have several textures: The color texture, the roughness texture, the Normal texture... sometimes, people also call those textures "maps".

Tilt

When working with Curves, you can "twist" the individual vertices of the curve. This can only be perceived when the cure has some depth, or thickness. This twisting is called the "tilt". This value can be found in the Option panel in the Transform tab. Or by pressing Ctrl+T.

Timeline

The part of the interface where keyframes for animation are displayed. You can press the Spacebar to start/stop playing animation, and you'll see that the playhead moves from left to right on the Timeline.

Toon shader

A toon shader is a material that gives your object a stylized look. This can be used for 2D-animation style rendering.

Transmission

The Transmission value of a material in Blender is the amount of light that can pass through it. A value of 0 makes an object completely opaque (not transparent), and a value of 1 makes it fully transparent.

Transparency

Transparency in a material is achieved with the Transparent BSDF node. It's generally not used for something like glass, but to tell Blender which parts of geometry are fully transparent, as if there was really no geometry there. This can be useful for alpha transparency, or for some specific effects like an inverted hull material in Cycles.

Tri or triangle

A Face made up of 3 Vertices or Edges. The simplest possible Face.

Triplanar

If you want to add a texture to an object which is not UV-unwrapped, you can do so with "triplanar" mapping. This simply projects the texture on the object from 3 planes (hence, tri-planar): x, y and z. Then, there is some blending where they meet so there is no sharp visible seam. In Blender, this is called "Box mapping". It is achieved by choosing the "Box" Projection type in the Image Texture node, and setting a Blend value. Usually the Blend-value is pretty low, like 0.1 or 0.2, depending on what looks good.

Unwrapping

Unwrapping is the process of unfolding a 3D object to a 2D layout, for the purpose of more easily editing the texture in a 2D space. It is achieved by adding selecting Edges to mark as "seams" first, and then selecting the Faces you want to unwrap and choosing unwrap (In Blender this is done in Edit Mode by pressing U and choosing Unwrap).

UV map

The unwrapped, 2-dimensional representation of a 3D object for the purpose of texturing.

UVs

UV's are the coordinates on a UV Map (see UV Map). As a UV Map exists in 2D-space instead of 3D-space, we use UVW instead of XYZ for coordinates to show that it's 2D we're talking about. And W is left out, as in 2D we only need two coordinates.

Vertex

The simplest object in 3D space, a point made up of X, Y, Z coordinates. Connect two Vertices and you have an Edge.

Viewport

The part of the interface where you can see the 3D objects visually, and where you can navigate in 3D space.

Volume

Volume tends to refer to such things as smoke, clouds, and fire. The Principled Volume shader can achieve realistic fire and smoke.

Volumetric

Volumetric can refer to for example Volumetric lighting: the visible beams of light that enter through a window in a room from outside, because of some smoke or dust inside the room.

Weight Map

A weight map is a Vertex Group created using weight painting. What does all that mean? The vertices of a model can have "weight" values between 0 and 1, which can be used in various ways. One way, is to tell an Armature (The skeleton of a model used in animation) how much it can influence those Vertices. A Weight Map is simply a visual representation of these values, where red is 1 and blue is 0 (with shades of green for the values in between). This visualisation is seen in Weight Paint mode.

Weld

Welding in Blender tends to refer to the welding or merging together of Vertices. You can use a Weld modifier on an object and set a value for how close together Vertices need to be to be merged (or welded) together. This can help eliminate double vertices, or reduce the complexity of a model.

Wireframe

3D-models consist of Faces, Edges and Vertices. Displaying the Edges on top of the model shows us what's known as the "Wireframe". It's an overlay of the Edges of the model. This is a good way to see the topology of the model, so it's often used to display the work that was done creating nice topology. In Blender you can enable a Wireframe overlay in the viewport overlay options.

World Origin

The center of the 3D world space. Press Shift+S and choose Cursor to World Origin to place the 3D cursor there.

Z-Depth

Z-Depth is the depth of the 3D world from the camera to the distance. You can render this depth as a grayscale image, where black is close to the camera and white is the far distance. With greyscale values in between. This can be used in compositing, to add mist or other volumetric effects to the image. Z-Depth helps to make the renders look more realistic, and less flat.

ZBrush

ZBrush is software initially intended for the creation of 2D concept art, using a proprietary technology for handling enormous amounts of vertices for the creation of "2,5D" images. Because of its ability to handle so much geometry however, it has become the industry standard 3D sculpting tool. In ZBrush you can handle 40 million vertices easily on a computer that can't handle that much geometry in other packages. Nowadays, hardware has caught up, making it possible to handle large vertex counts in other software such as Blender as well. However, sculpting in ZBrush is still buttery smooth and the brushes work really well. The downside of ZBrush is its legendarily strange User Interface, which hasn't really seen much improvement in 2 decades.

Do you have a question or comment about this 3D Vocabulary? Leave a comment below.