Terminology

This article will introduce you to UNIGINE 2 terminology. When working with the engine, you may not be able to recognize what are the meanings of some terms. For example, cameras in UNIGINE are represented with the word "Player" which means that the viewport, created into a world, is the first-person camera. Below you will find the basic terms used in UNIGINE with the links to more detailed articles.

Nodes and node references are fundamental objects that form the world:

•   Node is a generic entity representing any object that is positioned and stored in the world.
•   Node Reference is a node that refers to an external file on the disk, which contains a pre-fabricated node (or a hierarchy of nodes) with all the material and property libraries that are required for its rendering.

For more information see Nodes reference.

UNIGINE provides a set of built-in objects allowing you to create a world containing practically all of the objects present in real life. For convenience, they are formed into several groups that are responsible for different kinds of operations:

Nodes include fundamental objects that form the world (nodes and node references), dummy nodes, layers, pivots and triggers. Light sources include objects providing different kinds of the scene illumination: global, omni-directional, projected, etc. Objects represent imitations of entities present in the real world: objects, sky, terrains, water, etc. Effects contain particles systems, physical fields, volumetric objects, decals, etc.

• Players represent different kinds of cameras.
• World Objects represent invisible nodes used for world management.
• Sound Objects represent sound sources and reverberations.
• Pathfinding Objects represent objects used for pathfinding.

Surface is a named non-overlapping subset of the object geometry (triangles). Each surface can have its own material or property assigned. It is also possible to enable/disable surfaces independently from each other.

For example, a static 3D mesh stored in a single file (house.mesh) can contain four surfaces: roof, walls, windows and floor.

Unigine has its own material system: all of the materials are organized in libraries and form materials hierarchy.

A material is a set of properties (states, options, parameters) and assets (2D, 3D textures), described in a .mat text file and associated with a particular object surface. A material refers to fragment, vertex and geometry shaders, describing how the material will look like. Shaders are written in the .shader files. Two shading languages, GLSL and HLSL, are used to write shaders.

For more information see the Materials reference.

The properties specify the way the object will behave and interact with other objects and the scene environment. For example, they specify if the object is interactive and whether it is a switch. For a character, properties can specify the character health points or gold amount. Thus, the properties make the nodes comply with the game/application logic.

Properties are organized according to the same principles as materials.

For more information see the Properties reference.