Professional Documents
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THE
ULTIMATE MOTION DESIGN
DICTIONARY
By: Ben Carmeli, Liam Clisham, Alan Demafiles, and Caleb Ward
Artwork by: Peter Pallag
Absolute Coordinates to Cycles Render Engine
A-C
Alembic Animatic
An open-source file format that has become almost uni- A rough video outlining the way in which a Motion
versally readable. It’s great for passing animation be- Graphic sequence will look before principle animation be-
tween 3D applications or baking out particle systems. gins. Animatics are typically used to pitch video ideas to a
client.
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Animation Area Light
The process of storytelling through movement. A type of light that emits rays from a geometric area in-
stead of a single point. These types of lights are useful for
Anisotropy creating softer shadows.
Anisotropy can be seen on metal surfaces, especially
brushed metal. An anisotropic surface changes in appear- Arnold
ance as it rotates its view. A 3rd-party render engine created by Solid Angle. Arnold
is an unbiased, CPU render engine.
Anti-aliasing
A method for preventing the jagged effect of aliasing. Us- Ashikhmin-Shirley
ing surrounding areas, it blends color values between pix- A BRDF model created by Michael Ashikhmin and Peter
els. Shirley in August 2000. It is super technical, and prides it-
self on being more physically accurate.
Aperture
The iris of a camera lens. The larger an aperture, the Aspect Ratio
shorter depth of field becomes as well as a greater Video/Image Width vs Height. The most common aspect
amount of light. The inverse is true as well. ratio is 16:9.
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Attenuation Beckmann
As light travels through air, its strength diminishes. The A specular highlight distribution model. Specifically
further the rays travel, the dimmer the light. This is at- micro-facet distribution.
tenuation.
Beeple
AVI The man. The myth. The daily king.
A video container/wrapper format used primarily by PCs.
Bend
Axis, Axes As it sounds, any deviations away from a straight line or
An Axis or multiple axes describe the origin and position position. Most 3D applications offer a bend deformer of
of an object in space, referenced by two intersecting sorts. After Effects also has a bend effect.
straight lines. XY, YZ, ZX
Bevel
B-Spline A bevel eliminates sharp edges from objects.
A B-Spline is a free-form curve defined by two axes. This
can be thought of as a simplified bezier curve. Bezier Curve
Named after Pierre Bezier, it is a technique for creating
Backface Culling curves.
A process that eliminates polygons facing away from the
active camera from being rendered. This can improve Biased
performance because less geometry needs to be ren- Biased rendering allows render engines to take shortcuts
dered. to increase production times while not compromising on
looks.
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are usually created in an image editing software like Pho-
Bit Rate
toshop.
The rate in which video is coded/decoded by a video play-
back software. Lower bitrates generally lead to smaller
Boolean
file sizes.
A modeling technique that takes overlapping objects to
create a new object using subtraction, union, or intersec-
Bitmap
tion.
A monochromatic raster image.
Boundary Box
Blender
A simplified cubic representation of a polygonal mesh or
An open source 3D software.
geometry.
Blending Mode
Box Modeling
The way in which color information from one layer is
A modeling technique using primitive shapes to create
passed on to other layers underneath. Blending modes
the basic foundational shape of a final model.
are typically used to stylize and image or video.
BRDF
Blinn-Phong
Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function. Using
This is a reflection model that uses a combination of dif-
four real-world variables to define how light is reflected
fuse reflection, specular reflection, and approximation of
on an opaque surface. The four variables are radiance, ir-
ambient lighting.
radiance, surface normal and incident light.
Boards
Brushes
Short for Storyboards. Boards are still images that outline
Design elements that used to simulate a paint or pen
the general design of a Motion Graphic sequence. These
stroke, or stylize a layer.
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Bucket Cap
A visual representation of the area that is currently being The closed sides of an object. Such as the top and bottom
rendered by an engine. of a cylinder.
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Child Cloner Object
An object that is influenced by another object (known as A cloner object inside of Cinema4D allows you to create
the "parent"). multiple clones of objects that can be affected by various
Effectors. Effectors can be used to offset positions, change
Chromatic Aberration colors, modify objects, and more.
Also known as "color fringing", is an optical anomaly that
occurs when a lens is unable to converge all wavelengths Codec
of color to the same focal plane. An algorithm used to package a video file. Codecs are typi-
cally used to reduce a video file size.
Cinema 4D
A 3D software used to model, texture, light, and animate Collapse Transformations
3D objects and scenes. Cinema 4D is the software of A setting in After Effects that allows a precomposed com-
choice for most modern Motion Designers. position to retain it's transformation information when
precomposed.
Cineware
A tool that allows After Effects artists to import 3D objects Color Correction
from Cinema 4D into After Effects. The process of adjusting the color of an image or video to
fix any color or exposure issues that may have resulted
Clone Stamp from on-set error or camera limitations.
A tool that copies pixel information from one area to an-
other using a brush. Primarily used in Photoshop. Color Depth
The number of bits (value steps) used to represent color.
The bits are divided into red, green and blue (as well as
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an optional alpha channel). There are 8-bit, 16-bit, 24-bit
Creative Cloud
and 32-bit color depths.
Adobe's collection of creative applications and cloud serv-
ices. Notable Creative Cloud apps include After Effects,
Color Grade
Photoshop, Premiere Pro, and Illustrator.
The process of stylizing the color of a video or image.
Cube (Box)
Compositing
A primitive object. Your 3D application may call them
The process of combining digital elements together to cre-
cubes or boxes.
ate visual unity.
Continuously Rasterize
A setting that tells After Effects to analyze a vector object
or nested composition every frame to remove pixelation.
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Data Mapping to Keyframe
D-K
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DUIK Element 3D
An industry-standard, free character rigging tool in After A paid plugin from Video Copilot that empowers After Ef-
Effects. fects artists to model and import 3D objects directly in Af-
ter Effects.
Dynamics
A branch of Motion Graphics that deals with the physics Elements
of digitally simulated objects. Dynamics are simulations A digital file used to enhance a Motion Graphic sequence.
that calculate how an object should act in the real world.
For example, how a sphere may bounce. Emission
The emission of light rays from an object or material.
Ease
To smooth. Usually referring to the smoothing of a key- Environment Map
frame. A map used to simulate reflection of the world without us-
ing any ray tracing.
Edge
A straight line connecting two points on a polygon. Essential Graphics
An Adobe Workflow that allows Premiere Pro users to
Edge Loop edit After Effects projects.
A method used when modeling to create a loop of multi-
ple polygons. Explainer Video
A branch of Motion Graphics that uses visual elements to
Effects educate an audience.
A tool that can be applied to an object or layer to manipu-
late the way it looks or interacts in a timeline.
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Export Falloff
1. To save a video file. 2. To send a project file to another Fall off can also mean Decay. However, it can also be used
application. as a representation of how intense an effect is at various
positions. How quickly the intensity moves from 0 to 100
Expression or any other values.
A snippet of Javascript used to perform utility tasks in Af-
ter Effects. Field of View
The range of view from top to bottom, left to right. A
EXR larger FOV allows for more of a scene to be viewed. The
A versatile 32-bit file format. This format is fantastic for inverse is also true.
compositing.
Fill Light
Extrude One or more lights used to assist in lighting a scene. They
To create a three-dimensional object from a two- are often less intense than the key light.
dimensional shape or plane.
Fillet
F-Curves The rounding of the edges on an object.
Cinema4D's graph editor.
Floating Values
Face A value scale starting with 0 and ending with 1. This scale
A shape made by a bounding points that makes a poly- is extremely precise, for example 0.12575.
gon.
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Flowchart Fractal Noise
A visual representation of the nesting structure of videos, An effect in After Effects used to simulate cloudy and dis-
images, layers, or effects, in a series of timelines or com- torted noise. One of the most widely-used effects in After
positions. A visual workflow diagram. Effects.
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GGX GPU Render Engine
A shading model for refraction through rough surfaces. Any renderer which leverages the computational power
of a computer's graphics card as opposed to its CPU. GPU
Global Illumination renderers tend to be synonymous with increased speeds.
Without getting super technical, global illumination (or Octane, Redshift, and Cycles are just some of the many in-
GI), is a calculation of how light bounces off surfaces and creasingly popular GPU renderers.
onto other surfaces. Without global illumination, the cal-
culation only accounts for the surfaces directly hit by a Gradient Ramp
light's rays. Gradient ramps allow you to easily interpolate between
different color and greyscale values using a small num-
Glow ber of control knots. These interpolated values can then
A common motion graphics post-effect, this is meant to be used to drive shading parameters like reflection
simulate the real-life phenomenon of light interacting strength or roughness, or even animations.
with the lens of a camera producing glows or light flares
over captured footage Grain
Visual noise in a video or image. Grain is typically used to
Gouraud Shading simulate the noise produced by a camera when shooting
This is a shading model that applies to objects in your on celluloid film.
viewport. This mode averages the normals of individual
faces of your objects so the surfaces seem smoother. Graph Editor
An diagram used to manipulate and visualize animation
GPU movement via a 2D chart.
An electronic circuit used to increase the graphics per-
formance of a computer processor.
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Graphics Card H264
A device that takes information from the CPU and turns it A popular codec used to significantly reduce a video's file
into pictures or video. size. H264 is typically only used when uploading a video
to the web.
Greebles
Refers to the technique of giving a model the impression Hand Tool
of complexity by adding simple, usually random, surface A tool that allows a Motion Designer to move around a
details. This term originated from VFX artists designing composition.
props for the original Star Wars trilogy.
Hard Drive Disk (HDD)
Green Screen A data storage device that uses a rotating disk to store in-
A bright green background that can be easily keyed using formation. HDD devices are typically much slower than
modern compositing applications. SSDs.
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High-Res Index of Refraction
High Resolution, Any pixel dimensions that are greater IOR for short. This is a real-world property of metallic
than the common resolution size. and dielectric materials that governs the way they reflect
and bend light.
Highlight
Often associated with reflection, highlights form on re- Indirect Lighting
gions of the surface where the light reflects most strongly Light rays that have bounced off of a surface, scattered,
based on the viewing angle of the camera. Highlights of- reflected or focused before reaching another surface.
ten do a nice job of defining the form of an object.
Interactive Preview Region
Hotkey A render window you can overlay atop your viewport so
A keyboard key, or sequence of keys, that can be pressed that it re-renders anything within its bounds. This is use-
to perform an action in a software. ful when doing anything that requires a lot of iteration,
as it can be faster to see the updates this way than doing
Houdini a Picture Viewer render
A high-end 3D animation software that specializes in
simulation and dynamics processing. Inverse Square
Inverse square law describes how the intensity of light
HPB weakens over distance. This is super important in setting
Rotational axis for Heading, Pitch and Bank. up realistic lighting in a 3D program
Illustrator Kerning
1. The most popular 2D vector-graphic editing software in The distance between two different letters.
the world. 2. A person who draws.
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Key
To remove a colored background.
Key Light
A term from photography, the key-light is the term for a
light, typically illuminating the front of your subject defin-
ing its form and dimension. You will often find it helpful
to start lighting your scene with the key, and then placing
additional lights anywhere else you'd like to fill in detail.
Keyboard Shortcut
A keyboard key, or sequence of keys, that can be pressed
to perform an action in a software.
Keyframe
A specific value in time. A cornerstone feature in modern
animation softwares.
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L-System to Purge
L-P
Leading Lossless
The distance between two stacked lines of type. Uncompressed or perfect quality.
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Low-Poly Modeling Mask
Typically refers to a popular kind of aesthetic in 3D A path that is used to cut out or add visual information to
which embraces the faceted look created by the consti- a layer.
tute polygons of 3D models rather than trying to hide
them Match Moving
The process of tracking and replacing physical objects
Luminance with digital elements.
A channel of Cinema4D's native material system. Any tex-
ture (bitmap or procedural) applied in the luminance Material
channel will generally be unaffected by lights or shadows A set of properties (governing aspects such as the color of
in the scene, giving it the appearance of being light- your object to how transparent it is) that define how your
emitting. model will render in your scene
LUT Matte
Look-Up Table. These files contain information that trans- A reference layer used to map the transparency of an-
forms the colors of an image to match a set profile. These other layer.
are normally used in post to color-grade 3D renders, but
some render engines allow you to view the render with Maya
the LUT applied right in the Picture Viewer. A high-end 3D modeling and animation software used at
the highest levels of Hollywood. Maya is known for its ro-
Macro bust character rigging tools.
1. An extreme close-up shot 2. An automated process usu-
ally initiated by a keyboard shortcut.
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Media Encoder Motion Blur
A video encoding software included in the Creative A simulation of the blur captured when recording move-
Cloud. ment on a video camera.
Mocha MP4
A professional spline-based tracking software. A free ver- A video container/wrapper that works on Apple and PC
sion is included in After Effects. devices.
MoGraph Multipass
Short for Motion Graphics. Allows you to output specific components of the final ren-
der. For example, you could have a pass that contains
MoGraph Tools only the reflectance data in your scene or a pass of just
The collection of effectors and generators within the Mo- the normals. These can be used in the compositing stage
Graph Module of Cinema4D. These tools allow for the pro- to modify the look of your render with a great level of
cedural animation of hundreds or thousands of objects in control.
a variety of ways
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random patterns. The procedural nature of this noise
N-Gon
means that it can be made to contain very fine levels of
A polygon composed of more than 4 points. These serve
detail and are unconstrained by texture resolution.While
well to cap complex holes in polygons but do not tend to
this is often used in texturing for natural looking pat-
react predictably under subdivision, hence their bad rep
terns, it can also be used to drive MoGraph animation.
among 3D modelers.
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Normals Optical Flares
These define the direction that a polygon is 'facing'. This A plugin developed by Video Copilot that allows users to
can be very important for proper shading. easily add lens flares into their compositions.
Nurb Orbit
Non-Uniform Rational B-Spline. Anything attached to this A navigation in the 3D viewport where the camera re-
term (which is used less nowadays) is generally referring volves about a fixed point in your scene.
to a geometric surface, specifically one generated in some
way from a Spline input. Examples include: Lofts, Lathes, Oren-Nayer
and Sweeps. A shading model for realistic diffuse surfaces. Simulates a
very fine rough surface
Octane
Very popular unbiased GPU renderer developed by Otoy Organic Modeling
with plugins for most 3D packages. Often sculpted models of subjects of a biological nature.
Think flowing, smooth surfaces, like an ear for example.
Open VDB
Open VDB is a versatile format for storing sparse voxel Orthographic
grid data. These have been used in a wide variety of cases A type of view you can use to navigate your 3D scene.
for fluid simulations, particle effects, and even complex This view removes any distortion that might be caused by
meshing. The technology is open-source and developed a perspective view (where objects further away appear
by Dreamworks Studios smaller) and is therefore useful in certain modeling situa-
tions.
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Parallax Particles
A optical effect where objects closer to a camera move at In 3D, particles are often simply points of data containing
faster speed than objects further away from a camera. information like position, velocity, orientation, etc. Be-
cause they lack geometry, millions of particles can be ma-
Parametric nipulated in a scene with relative ease.
Parameter-based. This refers to objects whose appear-
ance is dependent on any number of variable parame- Pen Tool
ters. For example, imagine a Cylinder being affected by a A tool used to draw paths and masks.
Bend deformer. Altering the strength of the bend de-
former actively changes the appearance of the cylinder. Persistence of Vision
Therefore, the Bend deformer (and its influence on the An audience's biological tendency to fill in gaps in move-
cylinder) are considered parametric. ment information. It's how a sequence of images can be
perceived as a video.
Parent
Usually an object or null which acts as the origin point Perspective
for all transformations of the child objects. Often materi- This view-type is closer to how humans perceive objects
als, tags or other properties on of the Parent can be inher- in real life, where objects further away appear smaller.
ited by the child (ya know, like how you have the milk- This is the default view-type in a Cinema4D viewport.
man's eyes).
Phong
Parenting A shading model intended to approximate smooth sur-
Connecting a layer's transformation data to another faces that would otherwise appear faceted due to the low
layer. amount of polygons.
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Photorealism or Photometric Ren- Pickwhip
A tool that links one layer or parameter to another.
dering
Rendering with the strict intention of producing photore-
Pitch
alistic renders using data taken from real light sources
This refers to a rotation that occurs about an object's lo-
and surface properties. This is most popular in architec-
cal X-Axis.
ture and industrial design.
Pivot Point
Photoshop
All 3D objects have an axis center. This acts as the point
A photo editing software used for design, compositing,
about which all Position, Scale and Rotation transforms
drawing, image utility, and photo manipulation.
occur. These can be thought of as anchor points.
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essed to determine how those points connect to form the
Planar
surface of the object.
Often used to describe polygons whose points all lie
within one plane.
Point Light
A 3D light whose rays originate from a single infinitely
Plane
small point in space and travel outward in all directions.
A Cinema4D geometry primitive, this is a flat rectangle
These are technically unrealistic as no light source is infi-
with parametric width and height subdivisions.
nitely small, but can be useful for lighting a 3D scene.
Playhead
Polygon
The tool used to indicate your video's point in time.
The two-dimensional surface defined by 3 or more non-
overlapping points. Polygons are the building blocks
Plugin
(err.. planes rather) of 3D models.
A third-party application that can be loaded into another
software.
Portfolio
A collection of a Designer's work.
PluralEyes
A tool used to sync multiple video feeds together in post-
Precompose
production.
The process of turning a layer or group of layers into a
nested composition.
Point Cloud
Imagine a 3D torus. Now delete all the edges and poly-
Preset
gons that make it up. What you're left with are the uncon-
An effect or effects with a set of saved values.
nected vertices that make up that shape. 3D scan data is
often collected raw as point cloud data, and then proc-
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Primitive ProRender
Primitives refer to the set of base parametric objects you AMD-developed GPU renderer recently included with
can create as starting points for modeling or to use as Cinema4D R19. While still early in development, ProRen-
models themselves. These often feature controls for reso- der is one of relatively few GPU renderers not dependent
lution in the form of segments, and controls to set the size on NVIDIA's proprietary CUDA technology.
and proportions.
Puppet Tool
Procedural A tool used to warp certain points of a video or image.
Rule-based'. This umbrella term can refer to animation,
shading, or a number of other aspects of a 3D program. Purge
Think of it like this, what if instead of manually keyfram- To remove and erase.
ing an object to move up 50 cm, we said "as this effector
moves over this cube, move up 50 cm"? By itself these
two animations might look identical, but if we apply this
one rule to 300 objects, we've now saved ourselves about
600 keyframes. That is just one specific example, proce-
duralism is a much much broader idea and is the founda-
tion of node-based tools such as Houdini.
Projection Mapping
Displaying a Motion Graphics sequence on an irregular
viewing surface like a building or statue.
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Quads to Syntheyes
Q-S
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Refraction Index Resolution
The measurement of the amount of refraction for a given The width and height of your video or image. HD resolu-
medium tion is 1920 x 1080.
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Roughness Screenshot
A material property that defines how much irregularity A single frame taken from a Motion Graphics or video
the surface has. Rougher surfaces appear duller. software.
Samples Script
The number of rays that a renderer uses to create an im- 1. A code sequence that performs a task. 2. A complete
age. Lower samples can result in more noise, grain & jag- text outline of a video.
gedness.
Seams
Scalar The lines where UV geometry is joined together.
Scalar refers to a value that is defined by one number. Of-
ten, scalar values will describe the strength of something, Sequence
like an effector. Scalar values exist in contrast to vector A single timeline.
values, which are defined by three numbers (like posi-
tion, or color) Shader
An algorithm used to simulate texture or lighting in a 3D
Scatter application.
To distribute objects or clones over surface geometry.
Done with Cinema 4D's Cloner in object mode, with Oc- Simulation
tane's Scatter object, or with X-Particles emitter set to Ob- A reproduction of real-world behaviors through mathe-
ject shape. matical algorithms & equations. In 3D these are com-
monly used to model characteristics of hair, cloth, liquid
and fire.
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Snapshot Squash and Stretch
A screenshot of a single frame that can be used for frame An animation principle used to simulate the natural way
comparison in After Effects. in which objects compress and contract when impacting
other objects.
Solid State Drive (SSD)
A data storage solution with no moving internal parts. sRGB
SSDs tend to be much faster than HDDs. A standardized Red Green Blue color space used widely
to describe a wide range of the color spectrum.
Specular
The amount of reflectivity a smooth surface has. Specular Standard Render
highlights are the bright spots of reflected light seen on The default native render engine inside Cinema 4D and is
shiny surfaces a fast, stable CPU based biased renderer
Sphere Stereoscopic 3D
A perfectly round geometrical object in 3d space. The 3d Two images rendered together from slightly different per-
equivalent of a 2d circle. spectives (mimicking our left and right eyes) that give the
illusion of depth when viewed.
Spline
A line that connects a series of vertices in 3D space. Be- Storyboard
cause it has no depth, it has no renderable geometry A visual script that outlines a videos key components.
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(Substance Painter) and procedurally create highly de-
tailed & photo-real materials (Substance Designer)
Subsurface Scattering
The effect of light penetrating slightly transparent sur-
faces that is then scattered and exits at a different angle
than where it entered. The effect is used to depict photore-
alistic renderings of skin and wax.
Supersampling
Used to bake textures with increasing levels of antialias-
ing. Use it to render smooth speculars & high resolutions
at the cost of increased render times
Syntheyes
A professional match-moving and video tracking soft-
ware.
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Taper to Z-Brush
T-Z
Template Timecode
A project file designed to be easily manipulatable. Tem- Number based information about the current time of a
plates are typically used by non-designers. video.
Tessellation Timeline
Divides a mesh into smaller tiles. In Cinema4D this is a 1. The place in which layers and keyframes are added
GPU enabled feature that allows realtime displacement to and adjusted. 2. A linear representation of time for a
be displayed in the viewport. scene that can also display keyframes and audio wave-
forms
Texture
1. A still, visual element used to add visual complexity to Title/Action Safe
a composition or object. 2. A 2D image (bitmap or proce- Guides used to help a Motion Designer know where they
dural) used in mapping a 3D object & describes the sur- can add text elements without fear of the text being cut
face's various properties including height, normals, specu- off.
larity, and reflection.
Toon Shader
Texture Map A non-photorealistic shader that enables renderings that
The application of a texture to 3D geometry by way of look like various styles of art.
various projections.
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Track Triplanar
Using a computer software to follow movement in a A texture mapping projection method using 3 planes that
video. allows for removal of texture stretching and seams.
Transparency Tumble
The ability of an object's material to allow light to pass To rotate an object around multiple axes. To do this on a
through selected Cinema 4D object, drag in-between the rotation
tool's axis handles.
Transparency Grid
A grid used to convey transparent areas in a composition. Tween
The process of interpreting the data between two key-
Trapcode Form frames.
A plugin by RedGiant that creates grid patterns around
3D objects in After Effects. Twist
A deformer object that allows for a curling around an ob-
Trapcode Particular ject's axis. In Cinema 4D, different deformations are possi-
The industry-standard particle generation plugin created ble via three modes.
by Red Giant.
Typeface
Triangulation A certain design of fonts that includes every type of
The process of triangulating or converting an object's se- weight.
lected polygons or n-gons in to triangles.
Typography
A section of the design industry that focuses on text.
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nates do for 2D & 3D textures with values ranging from 0
Unbiased
to 1.
Describes a render engine that takes no approximations
or shortcuts in its calculation of a render, often at the cost
Vector
of speed when compared to biased solutions
In Cinema 4D, this data type holds 3 components to de-
scribe object position, rotation, color & point coordinates.
Unity
A cross-platform game engine developed by Unity Tech-
Vector Graphics
nologies
Graphics that use computer algorithms, rather than pix-
els, to create an image. Vector Graphics can be scaled up
Unreal
without pixelation.
A cross-platform game engine developed by Epic Games
Versioning
Unwrapping
Saving a project file so that it is compatible in previous
The process of unwrapping 3D geometry into a flat 2D UV
versions of the software.
space for the purposes of texture mapping.
Vertex
UV
The point where two or more edges meet.
A map that contains a flattened, unwrapped version of
3D geometry. UV map allows for 2D textures to be placed
Vertex Map
on corresponding parts of the mesh.
A map that stores a level of influence from 0-100% for
any given point. It can be used to limit or restrict defor-
UVW
mations on geometry.
The coordinate system for textures. Much like what XYZ
coordinates do for geometry in 3D space, UVW coordi-
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Viewport Voxel
One or more windows with which to view a 3D scene in- Short for volumetric pixel. Much like a pixel represents a
cluding perspective and various orthogonal views (i.e., value on a 2D grid, Voxels represent points in 3D space.
top, left, front)
VRay
Volume A 3rd party hybrid CPU + GPU renderer created by Chaos
The space contained inside a 3D shape, with length, Group for a number of 3D applications.
width & height. Volume can also refer to data stored in
3D grids in such file formats such as Open VDB to create Walk Cycle
effects such as smoke, fluids & clouds. A loop showcasing how an animated character walks.
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Weld X-Axis
A modeling operation that connects two or more selected The horizontal line in a coordinate system designating
points and consolidates them into one. the left & right of the world or object. Seen as a red han-
dle in Cinema 4D
Wet Map
A map that stores information left by particles after con- XParticles
tact with surface geometry to simulate the look of wet- A 3rd party particle system plugin developed by Insy-
ness. dium used to simulate particles, cloth, fluids, smoke and
fire
White Balance
The color balance of a video or image. Xpresso
Cinema 4D's visual expression system. Used to create com-
Wireframe plex, automated object interactions visual thru use of con-
1. A grid-based rendering of a 3D or 2D object. 2. A repre- nected nodes.
sentation of a 3D model where only lines and vertices are
shown. Y-Axis
The vertical line in a coordinate system designating up
World Coordinate System and down of the world or object. Visually color colored
A system that uses a group of numbers to indicate the po- green in Cinema 4D
sition of points or geometry relative to the center of a
scene (0,0,0). Yaw
Rotation around the vertical axis of an object.
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Z-Axis (Bonus) Numbers Section
The line in a coordinate system designating depth of the
world or object. Visually color colored blue in Cinema 4D 2D
A style of design that features flat design elements with-
Z-Depth out 3D depth. Popular styles include explainer videos,
1. A computed distance from a camera. Z-Depth is typi- logo reveals, and cartoon character animation.
cally calculated in 3D applications. It is also crucial for
creating depth mattes, which are important for realistic 2.5D
compositing work. 2. A rendered 2D image pass contain- 2D design elements in 3D space.
ing the depth information of a shot, typically a 16-bit or
higher greyscale image. Often used for calculating depth 3D
of field using 3rd party compositing plugins. Any design element with depth. 3D elements are usually
created in 3D software like Cinema 4D.
ZBrush
A digital sculpting tool developed by Pixologic. 3D Coat
A 3D application touted for it's ability to perform UV un-
wrapping.
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