Glossary

This section introduces some of the concepts that Awakening uses to describe 3d components.

Vertex:
A vertex is a single point in 3d space. It's specified by three coordinates x, y and z.

Triangle:
A basic unit of 3d object,  determined by three vertices.

Mesh:
A triangle list.

Surface:
A series of connected triangles; all triangles in one plane. You can consider it a special mesh.

Static Mesh:
A Mesh, but unlike Surface, not requiring all triangles to be coplanar. Static Mesh is used to represent outdoor scenes because usually the area of triangles is much greater in outdoor scenes, so the lighting for "Static Mesh" is not base surface, but vertices. This reduces the file size of the lighting data.

Mobile:
A Mesh for those movable objects in scenes. You not need ( couldn't ) calculating Mobile's lighting, because it's lighting is real-time. Mobile can be a helper for casting shadow, radiosity bake and caustics.

Skin Mesh:
Skinning is a technique to deform a mesh in real time using a skeleton hierarchy. This technique usually is used to simulate objects that have soft surface like animals and characters. A Skin Mesh is a mesh have skin data, can deformed by Bones Animation.

Bones Animation:
Bones Animation is a set of bones with animation data, you can imagine them as a animated skeleton. Bones Animation is used to deform Skin Mesh.

Effect:
A sort of 3d objects are used for simulating smoke, dust, particles, etc. Effects commonly is transparent. In current version of Awakening, there are two types of effect: Billboard, Particle.

Overlay:
A 2D Object that cover all 3D content. Overlay can be Text, Image, etc. Commonly Overlay is use to design user interface, you can assign actions for Overlay to custom UI.

Action:
A action is a simple function like Play Sound, Show/Hide Object, etc. A action consist of three parts: Message, Function, and Object. Message is a trigger condition like  mouse button press, release, etc. Function means do something. Object is Function's operand, according to differ Function, can be Sound, Shot, etc, or just null.

Material:
Materials describe how polygons reflect light or appear to emit light in a 3-D scene, and pixel appearance. Essentially, a material is a set of properties that explain the following things about the polygons it is rendering.
         1. How they reflect ambient and diffuse light
         2. What their specular highlights look like
         3. Whether the polygons appear to emit light
         4. What texture used for polygons
         5. How to integrate all above stuff to produce pixel

Light:
Lights are used to illuminate objects in a scene. The current version of Awakening employs  three types of lights: point lights, spotlights, and directional lights.

Point Lights:
Point lights have color and position within a scene, but no single direction. They radiate light equally in all directions. Point Lights are also sometimes called omni lights. A light bulb is a good example of a point light. Point lights are affected by attenuation and range. 

Spotlights:
Spotlights have color, position, and a direction in which they emit light. Light emitted from a spotlight is made up of a bright inner cone and a larger outer cone, with the light intensity diminishing between the two. A flashlight is a example of a spot light. Spotlights are affected by falloff, attenuation, and range. The light parameter Theta controls the inner cone, Phi controls outer cone, and Falloff controls the light intensity graduations from inner cone edge to outer cone.

Directional Lights:
Directional lights have color, position and direction, are not affected by attenuation or range. They emit parallel light. This means that all light generated by directional lights travels through a scene in the same direction.

Light Map:
A light map is a texture or group of textures that contains information about lighting in a 3D scene.

base texture		lightmap		lighting effect

Patch Size:
Describes sample space of lighting calculation on surface. Smaller patch sizes carry more detailed lighting, but increase light map size.

Mirror:
A surface that has Reflection property. Such surface will reflect ray like a mirror in lighting calculation.

Ray Tracing:
A conventional method of rendering three-dimensional computer images. This method simulates rays start from light, then travel through world.

Radiosity:
A new-style method of rendering three-dimensional computer images. This method simulates light-energy abound in world.

Caustic:
A indirect illuminated light patterns. This sort light patterns are formed when light rays reflected from or transmitted through specular surfaces strikes a diffuse surface. This phenomena can be found at underwater scenes.

Section:
A closed 3D space area. In Awakening, use a series planes to describing Section. For example, a room's four wall + floor + ceiling, total six planes compose room space area. 

Portal:
A window of Section, connect section space and outside. In Awakening, use a rectangle to describing Portal. If stand in section, the only way to look outside is portal, vice versa.

Shot:
A clip, a segment of movie. In a shot, you can animate camera, light, material, 3d object..., almost everything in scene. By  control shots, you can make movie.

Scene:
A virtual 3D world described by a .sce file.

Controller:
Controller is the algorithm that  evaluate parameter's output value when doing animation.

Frame Time:
The animation is consist of a lot of frames. Frame Time is specific & exclusive time of every frame.