Glossary

 VFace Docs  » 0.2 Glossary 

  • Albedo: In PBR rendering, it is a color texture from which the shadows have been removed.

  • Anti Aliasing: Aliasing is a jagging effect on the edge of your image. Your computing is managing with a low resolution resulting in a bad displaying of a proportion of the image. Anti-aliasing will interpolate your pixel and will remove this jagging effect.

  • Bit depth: Tells you how many colors an image can store. You can know the number of colors for several bits by using a 2 to the power of the bit-depth.

    1-bit images contain 2 colors, 2-bit images contain 4 colors...The 16-bit images contain 65536 colors.
  • Blur: A blur is a filter algorithm. This algorithm will search neighbors for pixels and apply the blur to this amount of pixel. There are different types of blurs. A gaussian blur produces a smooth result. A blur will reduce the details and the noise of your image.

  • Bound padding: A displacement method is integrated into a bounding box, resulting in extension clamping. Enlarging the bound padding will allow you to enlarge the bounding bow and to include additional displacement.

  • Bucket size: The size of your bucket displayed while rendering an image

  • Source mesh: The mesh that will be wrapped around the target mesh or the one that will share its textures.

  • Destination mesh: Also called target mesh, this will be the mesh that will be used as the reference to re-create its topology with the source mesh with the wrap method. The destination mesh would also receive the textures of the source mesh.

  • Displacement: A Displacement map will store height information in a grayscale texture. It will be projected on a tessellated mesh to create displacing points surface details. The information is stored in a floating-point file, in 8, 16, or 32 bit. The more bit depth you have, the more height information you will get.

  • Edge padding, edge extend: When rendering a map, you may have white gutters in your UV shells. Your engine would use down-sampling to smooth these gutters.

  • EXR: An EXR format is a floating-point format, originally developed by ILM. The EXR will accept negative values, allowing your displacement maps to displace points on your model under the mid-value. An EXR file can be up to 32-bit, meaning a huge amount of levels. You can use up to 64 different channels with this format.

  • Format, image type: the way an image is coded, in the form of bits sequences giving us binary information.

  • Frequency separation: Process consisting of separating different frequencies and storing them into different channels. For a 32-bit EXR float image, you can store three types of frequencies (low, middle, high) in the R, G, and B channels, one channel for each frequency.

  • Grade: Term regrouping different image transforming processes. Grading an image with software tools will sample your pixels and allow you to modify the white and black points, the mid-value, add an offset...It can help you with over or underexposed images

  • High pass: A high pass is a mathematical process consisting of a difference between an image and a blurred version of this same image. Hence, according to the amount of blur, you can store in the high pass result the number of frequencies you want. The more the image is blurred, the highest will be the frequencies.

  • Mid value, Midpoint, Zero value: In a displacement map, the mid-value determine the points that store the average of every point's height information in the map, creating a middle value. This point will be used as a reference to set the spots where the geo won't move, storing perfect grey information, neither carving, neither bumping, considered as a shift of displacement amount. Depending on a graded or calibrated map, this midpoint can have a different value (0 or 0,5)

  • Normal: A Normal map would store information of direction for each pixel based on normals. The RGB channels are used to determine the direction. Hence, with a normal map, you can fake some details on low-poly. The normal stores the high-poly pixel information and where it's slippering, so you can have a curvature illusion, meanwhile, the low poly model keeps unchanged.

  • Normalize: Normalizing the Process of eliminating errors on your data. This can be a geometry or a texture map for instance.

  • Offset: Offsetting is adding a positive or negative fixed value to the result, resulting in darkening or lightening the image.

  • Resolution: The resolution of an image refers to how many pixels are displayed per inch. Images with higher resolution automatically have more pixels displayed per inch. The more pixels you have, the more information you can store in your image. A 600Ppi image would have 600 pixels per inch. The resolution of an image is different from its dimensions.