Glossary
- draw context
- A draw context contains a view matrix and a projection matrix. Together, these matrices define the parameters for a virtual camera that views the 3D scene.
- effect
- An effect contains two shaders: a vertex shader and a pixel shader (also referred to as a "fragment shader"). The vertex shader processes the vertex positions, which are defined in local object space, and converts them to screen space. It also performs lighting and other per-vertex calculations. The pixel shader generates the color of the individual pixels based on interpolated vertex data coming from the vertex shader.
- fragment shader
- See pixel shader.
- material
- A material defines the surface parameters of a 3D object, such as its diffuse, ambient, and specular colors. The material's parameters are used by the effect to determine the rendered appearance of the object's surface.
- pack
- A pack holds references to other data. Its only function is to manage the lifetime of data. For example, if you create a new pack, then load a COLLADA file into that pack, all the textures, states, buffers, shapes, and transforms are associated with that pack.
- pixel shader
- The pixel shader uses the output of the rasterizer and calculates the color of each pixel in the O3D window. Also called fragment shader.
- primitive
- A shape is composed of one or more primitives. A given primitive can have only one material assigned to it.
- render graph
- A tree of nodes and associated parameters that describe how to display the transform graph's draw elements.
- rendering
- Rendering is the process of traversing the render graph, executing the operations of each node in the render graph to draw objects on the screen.
- sampler
- A sampler is an object that describes how to apply a texture bitmap to a shape's surfaces.
- shape
- Shapes contain references to the data to render a shape: vertex buffers, index buffers, effects, state, as well as the material parameters an effect needs to be rendered.
- texture
- A texture is a 2D array of pixel data.
- transform
- A transform contains a local matrix parameter. When transforms are arranged in a parent/child relationship, their local matrices will be concatenated automatically to provide a world matrix.
- transform graph
- A transform graph is a hierarchy of transforms, with associated shapes, materials, and effects.
- vertex shader
- The vertex shader calculates the position of each vertex, in homogeneous clip space, as well as the value of each per-vertex attribute.
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