Computer Graphics Glossary

The base color of a surface representing the proportion of light it reflects diffusely, independent of lighting conditions.

The process of combining a translucent foreground pixel with a background pixel based on the alpha (opacity) value to simulate transparency.

A shading technique that approximates how much ambient light reaches each point on a surface, darkening crevices and corners for added realism.

Techniques that smooth jagged edges caused by the discrete pixel grid, including MSAA, FXAA, and TAA.

Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function: a mathematical function describing how light is reflected at an opaque surface for given incoming and outgoing directions.

Removing or trimming primitives that lie outside the view frustum so they are not processed in later pipeline stages.

A programmable GPU shader stage used for general-purpose parallel computation, not tied to a specific graphics pipeline stage.

A per-pixel buffer storing the distance from the camera to the nearest surface, used for hidden surface determination.

Light scattered equally in all directions from a surface, producing a matte appearance whose brightness depends on the angle between the surface normal and the light direction.

A potential pixel produced during rasterization, containing interpolated attributes (color, depth, texture coordinates) that a fragment shader processes into a final pixel.

GPU memory that holds the rendered image data, including color, depth, and stencil buffers.

The truncated pyramid-shaped region of space visible to the camera, defined by near and far clipping planes and the field of view.

Rendering algorithms that account for both direct and indirect light transport, producing effects like color bleeding and caustics.

A coordinate system using four components (x, y, z, w) that enables all affine and projective transformations to be represented as matrix multiplications.

A collection of vertices, edges, and polygonal faces that defines the geometric shape of a 3D object.

A precomputed set of progressively lower-resolution texture images used to reduce aliasing and improve texture sampling performance.

A unit vector perpendicular to a surface at a given point, used in lighting calculations to determine the angle of light incidence.

An optimization that skips rendering objects completely hidden behind other objects, reducing the number of draw calls.

Converting vector primitives (triangles) into discrete pixel fragments on a 2D grid for display.

A rendering technique that simulates light by tracing rays from the camera through pixels and computing their intersections with scene geometry.

The integral equation (Kajiya, 1986) that describes the total outgoing light from a surface point as emitted light plus integrated reflected incoming light.

A small program running on the GPU that computes transformations, lighting, and coloring at various stages of the graphics pipeline.

Mirror-like reflection of light concentrated around the reflection direction, producing bright highlights on smooth or glossy surfaces.

The process of subdividing geometry into smaller primitives to add detail, often performed dynamically on the GPU based on distance from the camera.

The technique of applying 2D images to 3D surfaces using UV coordinates to add visual detail without extra geometry.