aliasing Rendering artifacts that occur when a continuous function is discretely sampled or sub-sampled. Two common types of aliasing are polygonal aliasing and texture aliasing. Polygonal aliasing is a rendering artifact that occurs when rasterization applies color to a pixel without considering how much of the pixel is covered by the triangle. Along the edges of the triangle, only a portion of the pixel is likely to be covered by the triangle. An aliased triangle will have jagged edges. Texture aliasing is a rendering artifact that occurs when a texture map is not sampled frequently enough or when the texel area covered by a pixel is not accounted for. See anti-aliasing.
alpha The A in an RGBA color. The alpha component is never displayed. It is a multiplier used to describe transparency and controls the blending of overlapping colors. See blending.
ambientlight One of the components of a lighting model. Ambient light seems to come from all directions rather than from a specific source. Back lighting in a room is an example. It scatters in all directions after striking a surface, as does diffuse light. See diffuse, emitted, and specularlight.
animation Generating and displaying a scene as the viewpoint and/or objects change position to give the illusion of motion.
anti-aliasingTechniques for eliminating aliasing. For polygonal aliasing, a rendering technique that accounts for fractional coverage of a pixel when assigning it a color, thereby reducing or eliminating the jagged edges that characterize an aliased rendering. For texture aliasing, a rendering technique that accounts for the areas of texels covered by a pixel. See aliasing.
API Application program interface.
ASIC Application-specific integrated circuit.
backfacecullingThe process of eliminating back facing triangles. A triangle has two sides, front and back, with only one side visible at a time. The sign of the area of the triangle determines which side is visible and can be used to eliminate back facing triangles before they are rendered.