Important Terms

If you don't come from a background in 3D art or game development this page will help you learn some of the basics of 3D models and rendering.

What is a mesh?

A mesh when talking about 3D models is simply the model itself. It's a series of vertices (points in 3D space) that are connected by edges to form faces.

Faces are what we see when the scene is rendered.

Models can be made up of 1 or more objects which themselves can be made up of 1 or more mesh.

You may hear the term emissive mesh in the GTA/FiveM community. This simply refers to a mesh with an emissive material on it. Commonly used as police lights.

What is a material/shader?

Shaders or materials (depending on the context) are what give us control over how the mesh will look when rendered. We can change the color of shaders and many other factors including emissive strength and specular values to simulate different materials.

In GTA/FiveM shaders use the specular workflow which includes a few channels including Diffuse (color) and Specular (glossiness).

By default shaders will affect every pixel on the mesh the same way. We can use textures to address different parts of the mesh with different values in each channel.

What is a texture?

A texture is simply an image file. With a fancy name in the context of 3D.

We plug these images into a shader to make it output different values at different spots on the mesh. Without textures shaders will apply the same value to the whole mesh.

TLDR

The mesh forms the shape of the 3D object, the shader makes the mesh look different based on inputted values, textures add detail to shaders by inputtingdifferent vales at different spots on the mesh.