Glossary

Common texturing and PBR terms.

Term	Meaning
PBR	Physically-Based Rendering — materials described by physical properties (albedo, roughness, metallic) so they look right under any lighting.
Base Color (Albedo)	The surface's pure colour, with no lighting or shadow baked in.
Roughness	How rough vs. glossy a surface is — controls how sharp reflections are.
Metallic	Whether a surface behaves as metal (1) or non-metal/dielectric (0).
Normal map	Encodes surface detail as directions, faking bumps without extra geometry.
Height	A displacement/parallax map representing surface elevation.
Ambient Occlusion (AO)	Soft contact shadowing baked from the mesh's shape.
Curvature	How convex/concave the surface is — drives edge wear and cavity effects.
Thickness	How thin or thick the surface volume is, from inward ray-casting.
UV	The 2D coordinates that map the texture onto the 3D surface.
Texel	One pixel of a texture (“texture element”).
Texture set	The layers/channels/maps for one material slot of the mesh.
Channel	One PBR output of a texture set (Base Color, Roughness, …).
Bake	Generating a mesh map (Normal, AO, …) from geometry.
Cage	An offset shell around the low-poly that bounds projection rays during baking.
High-poly / Low-poly	The detailed sculpt vs. the optimised game mesh; baking projects detail from high to low.