A few of you know of a little educational project that I'm working on, documenting a lot of my knowledge.

Anyway, after writing a section on geometry, explaining what verts and edges and polys and tris and quads are, I came to part where I'm stuck. Sort of.

You know when we build a single continuous mesh, and then intersect it with other meshes? Like we build a human, then intersect the ammo pouchs, or put on the shoulder pads as a separate object?

What would you call those?

Are they meshes? Is it a model made up of meshes, or a meshes made from models, or a compund mesh? Or just a model with objects? Just looking for a few other folks views.

I call them objects.

elements?

I agree with either of those two

Q3 model is made out of 3 meshes (or more if it has segmented hands, shoulderpads etc.), thats how i take whats what :P
Just couldnt find a better way to say it :S

Objects? Elements?

In max its an element, says so on the tooltip. What about Maya?

Hm. Maya doesn't quite work in the same way as Max (understatment of the year), but I think elements is probably a fairly safe term, even if its not an official one for all the different apps.

In that case - a few other max vs maya terms please - if they are different:

materials - are these still materials, or are they called shaders?
material IDs
smoothing groups

Ta!

I think materials are referred to as shaders in maya - Max's Material Editor is analogous to Maya's "HyperShade".
Smoothing Groups in Max are analogous to Maya's soft/hard edges.
Not sure about Material ID's ... never used those in Maya.

I would call a sub-object of a model an "element" ... however only if it was physically part of the model. If it was a separate object, I would call it a mesh.

materials are called materials in maya, it's only the editor that's different, you've got multilister and hypershade in place of max's material editor
only thing i can think of that's similar to material id's is quick sets, as i only ever used material id's for selection purposes

accessoires?

As I’ve always understood it, they are ‘elements’ if they are separate from the primary mesh but still exist within the modifiable structure of the original mesh. If they are separate and require a unique modifier then they are ‘objects’. ‘Mesh’ is a general term referring to the complex structure of vertices and edges. ‘Model’ is a broad term for the mesh as a whole which derives from the process of modeling.

Example: You edit the ‘mesh’ but rotate the ‘model’. You attach all ‘objects’ in the scene to create a single ‘mesh’ comprised of ‘elements’.

- BoBo

Element sounds more like a essential part of an entity. Like, an edge is an element of a polgon. Max's vocab is confusing. I like to think of seperate objects just as that. Objects, or sub-objects, created from a mesh. And if you're dealing with how the object interacts with the whole model during animation, that could be child or parent object. etc.