As a person who went through many phases, 3d graphic, real-time engines, programming and now AI, I noticed that there is a plethora of words that persist through these fields. At the very fundamental level, they might describe the same thing, but they are abstracted into a unique, niche fitting idea.
That's why, depending on your expertise you'll understand the word "model" differently. Mostly because you see it through a different abstraction or you use models in a conceptually different way. A model can be used as a predictive tool but it can also be used as a descriptor. Is some cases it's also prescriptive.
3D MODEL – MY FIRST MODEL!
If you're a 3D Modeller working in Blender, 3Ds Max or other tool, you see a mesh that can be deformed, textured, animated or rendered. That all it was for me. Something I look at and manipulate with instant feedback.
At some point I got involved in interactive applications and worked alongside Unity (a real time engine) engineers. I realised “model” meant something completely else to them. They were asking about vertex orders and weights. Flipped normals, gizmos that weren’t matching Unity coordination system. (Damn you, right-hand coordinate system!). Model wasn’t a visual thing for them. It was a weird combo of constraints and very specific properties.
Read the rest on my blog: https://0byte.io/articles/many_meanings_of_model.html
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