General Animation
The ability of a character to hold the viewer’s attention and be relatable.
Appeal
An object placed inside the skeleton of a character that represents a bone in a rig.
A virtual viewpoint in 3D space that possesses both position and direction, and represents the viewer’s eye.
Camera
A simple three dimensional form used as the basis for constructive solid geometry modeling techniques. These include the plane, the cube, the sphere, the cone and the torus.
Primitive
A set of attributes that determine the ways in which the surface of a model to which they are applied reacts to light.
The display showing the timing of the key frames in a sequence of animation.
Timeline
Points of articulation between the bones in a character rig.
A value of framing where the whole subject is relatively small enough to fit the height of the frame. The entire human body is visible, with the head near the top of the frame and the feet near the bottom.
Long Shot
A geometry element formed by connecting three or more vertices.
Polygon
An image that is applied to the surface of 3D object to give it detail.
Texture
The process of matching a character’s facial movements to a spoken soundtrack during facial animation.
Lip Syncing
A character animation technique for controlling the motion of the bones in a chain in which rotations higher in the joint chain affect joints farther down the chain.
Forward Kinematics (FK)
A system of CG lighting derived from real world cinematography and photography, in which a scene is illuminated by three light sources.
Three Point Lighting
A modeling technique in which a two dimensional outline or profile is duplicated outwards along a linear path, and the set of duplicated profiles joined to create a continuous three dimensional surface.
Extrusion
The coordinate system used for assigning textures to polygonal models that must be unwrapped and exported to a paint package for texture painting.
UV's / UV Editing
Movement along a straight line in any direction on the X,Y, or Z axis.
Translation
The process of binding the surface geometry of a model to the underlying skeleton during rigging.
Skinning / Binding
A component of the Three Point Lighting system which acts as the primary source of illumination for the scene.
Key Light
(Non-Uniform Rational B-splines) A method of mathematically describing curves and surfaces characterized by the smooth organic forms they produce.
NURBS
An image with lighting information based on Tangent space normals, to give low poly objects the illusion of being high detail. It uses an RGB color scheme.
Normal Map
Are handles on keys in the graph editor that allow the animator to manipulate the curves between keys.
Tangent
The process of determining which bone in a skeleton affects how part of a model’s surface mesh deforms based on its strength.
Skin Weights
A shot of someone or something taken from the perspective or camera angle from the shoulder of another person. The back of the shoulder and head of this person is used to frame the image of whatever (or whomever) the camera is pointing toward.
Over the Shoulder
An object created by combining/subtracting two objects using mathematical operators.
Boolean
A surface property of an object that determines the way in which highlights appear on that surface.
Specularity / Specular Attributes