Abbreviations/Glossary/Slang
 

Abbreviations, Glossary, and Slang for all those confusing maya (and other software) terms that people throw around.

AA: Anti-aliasing - the softening or smoothing of edges to prevent "jaggies"
AE: Attribute Editor or (Adobe) After Effects
AI: Adobe Illustrator
AO: Ambient Occlusion
BG: Background (e.g. BG plate)
CA: Chromatic Aberration - slight color shifts that occur because of imperfect camera optics
CV: Control Vertex
DOF: Depth of Field - range from foreground to background that is in focus
DM/Dis map: Displacement map - texture to create additional surface detail
FCP: Final Cut Pro
FG: Final Gather
FK: Forward Kinematics
GI: Global Illumination
Geo: Geometry
HiPoly : High polygon mesh - a dense mesh with a high number of poly faces
IK: Inverse Kinematics
LoPoly : Low polygon mesh - a mesh with a small number of poly faces
ma: Maya ASCII - file format
Max: 3ds Max - Maya's bitter rival (owned by Autodesk too)
mb: Maya Binary - file format
MB: Motion blur - Blurring of objects in motion
MEL: Maya Embedded Language - scripting language built into Maya
N-gon: Polygon or face with > 4 edges/sides
NM : Normal map - texture to simulate additional surface detail
obj: Geometry file format - contains geometry and UV information
persp: Perspective view or camera
Poly: Polygon or Face
Prefs: Preferences folder - on Windows, typically located in "...My Documents\maya\2013-x64\prefs"
PS: Adobe Photoshop
SSS: Subsurface scattering - a feature of light as it penetrates and scatters inside translucent materials
Tri: Triangle, a face with 3 edges/sides
UVTE: UV Texture Editor
Verts : Vertices, points on a mesh
Wires: Wireframe shading mode, usually wireframe on shaded
Z: Pixologic ZBrush

Link people asking about abbreviations to this post for reference. PM me to add more to the list.

Thanks! will try to remember to go on this topic once i get confused with shortenings :)

Abbreviations, Glossary, and Slang for all those confusing maya (and other software) terms that people throw around.:nerd::ninja::beer::playfull::playfull: