Reference

Glossary

The manual uses Orbit's own names for many of its tools and ideas, such as render look, lane and NO POP, and general 3D words like mesh, normal and dither. Where a topic covers a term in depth, the term links to it.

Term	Meaning
Active item	The object, light or group you selected last. `⌘L` acts on it alone, and `O` and Tab act on it when it is an object. In a boolean, the active object is the target, whose material the result takes.
Ambient light	Light that fills in the parts of a surface that no light reaches directly. AMBIENT in RENDER SETTINGS chooses how Orbit makes it (FLAT, SKY-TINTED or GATHERED), and each material's AMBIENT value sets how much of it the surface takes.
Anti-aliasing	Smoothing the stepped edges of objects in a render by tracing several rays through each pixel and averaging them. In RENDER SETTINGS, ANTI-ALIASING is NONE or 2×2 (4 SAMPLES).
Area light	A light shaped like a flat panel. Its shadows have soft edges in renders, except under RAY '95, TERRA '96 and GLIDE '99, which make them hard.
Array	Copies of one object laid out in a pattern, such as a grid, a ring or a scatter across a terrain. The copies follow every change to the original, and clicking any copy selects the original.
Autosave	A copy of a scene with unsaved changes that Orbit writes in the background every 30 seconds. If Orbit quits unexpectedly, the next launch offers Recover, which opens the work as a new untitled scene.
Boolean	An operation that combines closed solids into one object. UNION joins them, SUBTRACT cuts the others out of the target and INTERSECT keeps only the space they share.
Bump	Shading that makes a surface look rough, grooved or patterned without changing its shape. BUMP SOURCE in the material editor sets where the pattern comes from.
Cage	A deformer that surrounds an object with a lattice of 2 to 5 points on each axis. Moving the points reshapes the object inside.
Camera target	The point the camera turns around when you orbit. `F` moves it to the selected object, and dragging with the middle mouse button moves it along with the camera.
Closed solid	An object whose surface has no holes or open edges, so it has an inside. Only closed solids can take part in booleans.
Color depth	How many colors a render can hold. 24-BIT is full color; 16-BIT and 15-BIT keep fewer shades of each color, so smooth gradients break into bands.
Color source	The setting in the material editor that decides where a surface's color comes from, one of SOLID, IMAGE, NOISE, PLANET or CELLULAR.
Column of object buttons	The narrow column at the left edge of the window, with a button for each kind of object, one for a light and one for the pen. A click adds that object at the center of the scene. `⌘0` hides the column together with OBJECTS and the INSPECTOR.
Command palette	A search box, opened with `⌘K`, that runs a command when you type part of its name and press Return.
Controls panel	The strip at the bottom of the viewport with the view icons, the camera sliders, LIVE, SNAP and other viewport controls.
Curve	In Loop Studio, a lane drawn as points joined by straight lines from the start of the loop to its end. The CURVE EDITOR is a separate sheet for drawing the profile of a lathe or an extrusion and the cross section of a tube.
Deformer	An effect that bends, twists or otherwise reshapes a whole object, set with sliders. Deformers stack in the DEFORMERS section and apply from top to bottom.
Depth of field	Blur that grows with distance from a chosen focus point, as in a photograph. Orbit adds it only to stills from EXPORT RENDER.
Dither	A fine pattern of dots or grain that lets a picture with few colors show smooth gradients without visible steps. Orbit offers NOISE grain and the BAYER 2, BAYER 4 and BAYER 8 crosshatch patterns.
Dock	The strip along the bottom of the window with the MATERIALS and SNAPSHOTS tabs and the ENVIRONMENT and RENDER cards. `⌘J` hides it and shows it again.
Editable mesh	An object whose points, edges and faces you move one by one, in the mode called poly edit. MAKE EDITABLE (TAB) turns a shape into one, and booleans and OBJ imports produce one.
Emitter	An object with no surface that releases glow motes from a point, a disc, a shell or a line. Renders show only its motes.
Environment	The sky, sun, clouds, stars and moon, ground plane, wind, fog and background image around the objects. It is saved with the scene and edited in the ENVIRONMENT BROWSER (`⌘E`).
Era look	One of the five render looks, RAY '95, TERRA '96, GLIDE '99, CHROME 2000 and RADIOSITY '96, each named after a year.
Example scene	One of six finished scenes that come with Orbit, opened from OPEN EXAMPLE as an untitled copy. Each offers to switch Orbit to the render look it was built for.
EXPORT RENDER	The toolbar button that opens the sheet for rendering the picture at full size and saving it as a PNG, JPEG or TIFF file.
Extrude	An object made by pushing a flat outline out into a solid, with optional caps and bevels.
Field of view	How much of the scene the camera takes in, measured as the angle from the top of the view to the bottom. FOV in the controls panel sets it.
FIT TO OBJECT	A button in the material editor that sizes and places an image so that one copy of it covers the selected object.
Free version, full version	The two states of Orbit. The free version never expires, but its renders carry a watermark and it cannot export objects; buying the full version once removes both limits.
Gesture strip	The list of drags and keys at the bottom left of the viewport, shown in poly edit, sculpt mode and cage edit mode, while the pen is on and in a scene with no objects. GESTURE HINTS in SETTINGS turns it off.
Gizmo	The arrows, rings or handles drawn on the selected object for moving (`W`), rotating (`E`) or scaling (`R`) it by dragging.
Glow	An effect, GLOW / BLOOM in RENDER SETTINGS, that makes the brightest parts of a render spill soft light into the pixels around them.
Glow motes	Small glowing specks, like fireflies, that drift from a growth or an emitter. They glow in the picture without lighting anything, and they repeat exactly in a loop.
GOURAUD	Shading worked out at the corners of each triangle and blended across it, chosen with SURFACE in RENDER SETTINGS. GLIDE '99 uses it, and it drops image and pattern textures.
Ground plane	An optional floor that stretches to the horizon, with its own color, reflection and pattern, set in the GROUND PLANE section of the environment.
Group	A set of objects and lights that can be moved and locked as one, made with `⌘G`. A group cannot contain another group.
Growth	A plant object grown from branching rules, in kinds such as TREE, CORAL and FUNGUS. REROLL grows a new plant of the same kind.
Hide	Removing objects from the viewport and from renders without deleting them (`H`). The scene saves them as hidden, and `⇧H` shows everything again.
INSPECTOR	The panel at the lower right of the window that shows the settings of the selected object, light or group.
Isolate	A temporary view of only the selected objects (`I`), which also limits renders to them. It is not saved; press `I` again to leave it.
Lane	One animated setting in Loop Studio, driven by an LFO or a curve.
Lathe	An object made by spinning a drawn outline around its vertical axis, as for a vase or a goblet.
Lens flare	Glows, spikes and rings drawn over a render from the sun's disc and from point or spot lights with an INTENSITY of 1.5 or more, when nothing blocks them. LENS FLARE in RENDER SETTINGS turns it on.
LFO	A repeating wave, such as a sine or a sawtooth, that makes a setting rise and fall around its starting value. The name stands for low frequency oscillator. RATE sets its speed.
Lighting preset	A set of lights chosen from the LIGHTING menu, such as THREE-POINT or DRAMATIC. Choosing one replaces every light in the scene.
LIVE preview	The small ray traced picture, 160 pixels square, that LIVE in the controls panel opens in a corner of the viewport. It redraws shortly after each change.
Lock	Protection against moving an object or light by accident, switched with `⌘L`. A locked item ignores gizmo drags and its TRANSFORM fields (POSITION and POINT AT on a light).
Loft	A surface stretched across two or more strokes drawn with the pen. It is an open shell with no inside, so it cannot take part in booleans.
Loop Studio	The second tab at the top of the window, where a scene is animated as a short loop and exported as a GIF, an MP4 video or a folder of PNG frames. Waves, glow motes and anything the wind moves play there without a lane.
LOOPS	A badge on the wave presets in the WAVE GALLERY whose seas repeat without a jump in Loop Studio.
Material	The full description of how a surface looks, including its color, shine, reflection, transparency and texture. Every object except an emitter has one.
MATERIAL BROWSER	The floating panel, opened with `M`, that holds the material presets and the material editor.
Mesh	The surface of a 3D object, made of flat faces joined at their edges and corners. Orbit builds one for every object except water and emitters.
Metaballs	Blobs that melt together into one smooth surface where they come close. A blob with a negative weight carves a dent instead.
NO POP, WILL POP	Loop Studio's check on the seam, where the last frame of a loop meets the first. LOOP · NO POP means every lane ends where it began, and LOOP · N WILL POP counts the lanes that jump.
Normal	The direction a surface faces at a point. Shading uses it to work out how much light the point receives.
Object file	A `.orbitobj` file holding one or more Orbit objects with all their settings, for use in another scene. Saving one needs the full version.
OBJECTS list	The list of every object, light and group in the scene, at the upper right of the window.
ORGANIC	A smoothing pass that rounds an object's corners and edges after its deformers have run. `O` switches it on and off for the active object.
Orthographic view	A view without perspective, in which distant things do not shrink. The Top, Front and Side views are orthographic.
Parametric	Built from settings you can change, such as the number of SIDES on a sphere. A parametric object rebuilds itself whenever a setting changes, until MAKE EDITABLE (TAB) turns it into a mesh.
Pen	A mode for drawing strokes in the viewport. One stroke becomes a tube and two or more become a loft.
Pivot	The point an object turns and scales around, which is its position. With several objects selected, MEDIAN uses their average position and EACH turns each one around its own.
Pixel scale	Enlarging a finished render by ×2, ×3, ×4 or ×6, so that each pixel becomes a solid block. The blocks help fine detail and dither survive when a video site compresses the file.
Point, edge and face	The parts of a mesh you select in poly edit. A point is a corner, an edge joins two points and a face is a flat polygon enclosed by edges.
Point light, spot light	A point light shines in every direction from one spot. A spot light shines a cone of light toward the point it aims at.
Preset	A named set of saved settings, such as a material or a sky, applied with one click. Orbit comes with a set of presets, and the ones you save are `.orbitmat` and `.orbitenv` files.
Primitive	A shape that Orbit generates from settings, such as a sphere, a box, a torus or a terrain. Every shape in the ADD OBJECT menu is a primitive.
Projection	The way an image is wrapped onto an object, such as SPHERICAL, CUBIC or TRIPLANAR. Orbit places every image texture this way.
Ray tracing	Making a picture by following rays from the camera into the scene and on toward lights and other surfaces. Orbit's renders use it to show shadows, reflections and transparency.
REFL DEPTH	The number of times a ray may bounce between mirrors, glass and the ground plane in a render, from 0 to 8.
Render	A finished picture that Orbit's ray tracer draws from the scene, or the act of making one.
Render frame	An outline in the viewport that shows where the edges of the export fall, with everything outside it dimmed. RENDER FRAME in SETTINGS turns it on, and Loop Studio and the EXPORT TURNTABLE sheet show it by themselves.
Render look	The style of every render, chosen under PRESET in RENDER SETTINGS. Each of the five looks sets many settings at once, and the RENDER card reads Custom when the settings match none of them.
Render settings	Every setting in RENDER SETTINGS, including the render look, ANTI-ALIASING and the effects. They belong to Orbit and apply to every scene, so a `.orbit` file does not carry them.
REROLL, ROLL	Buttons that try a new random result. REROLL gives a growth, an emitter or a terrain a new seed, and ROLL makes a new sky, material or Scene Wizard scene. The ROLL slider in the controls panel is different; it tilts the camera.
Scene	The objects, lights, groups, environment, camera, snapshots and Loop Studio lanes in the window, saved together as a `.orbit` file.
Scene Wizard	A panel that builds a whole scene, either a landscape or a 3D logo, from a few choices and a random seed. ROLL makes a new version and ACCEPT keeps it.
Sculpt	Pushing and pulling an object's surface by dragging on it, using the MAGNET PULL deformer and its SCULPT button.
Seed	A number that fixes the random choices behind an array, a growth, a terrain or a Scene Wizard roll. The same seed with the same settings gives the same result.
SMOOTH ANGLE	The angle at which the edge between two faces starts to show as a sharp crease. At the default of 180 degrees, every edge looks smooth.
SNAP	A switch in the controls panel that makes dragged objects stop at grid lines and at the faces of other objects' bounding boxes, and turns rotation into steps of 15 degrees. Holding Shift during a drag reverses it. A lane's SNAP button in Loop Studio is a separate control that adjusts the lane's rate or last point to close the loop.
Snapshot	A camera angle saved with the scene, added with `⇧⌘S`. A scene holds up to nine, and `⌘1` to `⌘9` return to them.
SOFT CLIP	A TONEMAP setting that rounds off the brightest parts of a render so they approach white gradually. CLIP, the other setting, cuts them off at white.
SOLO	A badge on the selected light's row in the OBJECTS list that renders a small picture lit by that light alone.
Spectral water	Water on the SPECTRAL wave model, which builds the surface from many separate waves and repeats exactly in a loop. Moving water on CLASSIC cannot loop.
Spline tube	A tube made by sweeping a drawn cross section along a path of points called the spine.
Sun disc, sun light	VISIBLE SUN DISC draws the sun in the sky, and SUN LIGHT makes the sun light the scene. Each works without the other.
Terrain	A landscape object whose shape is a grid of heights, from 64 × 64 to 512 × 512, generated from noise. REROLL makes a new landform.
TERRAIN EDITOR	A floating panel for shaping a terrain by hand with the RAISE, SMOOTH and FLATTEN brushes and with filters that APPLY commits.
Trait	One of five qualities built into a render look that no control in RENDER SETTINGS can change, such as hard or soft shadows from area lights. The traits stay as the last look set them after the PRESET row turns to CUSTOM.
Turntable	An animation of the camera circling the scene once, made with Export Turntable… in the File menu and saved as an MP4, a GIF or PNG frames.
Undo step	One saved state that `⌘Z` returns to. Orbit keeps 50, and camera moves and render settings are not among them.
Untitled copy	A scene with no file behind it, such as an opened example or recovered work. The first `⌘S` asks where to save it.
View mode	One of the four ways the viewport draws a scene, Wireframe, Flat, Shaded or Material, chosen with the icons in the controls panel.
Viewport	The large 3D view in the middle of the window where you build the scene. It updates as you edit but draws no shadows.
Water	A flat water surface that stretches to the horizon at a chosen height, with waves set in its RIPPLES section.
Watermark	The two marks on pictures and videos from the free version, Made with Orbit 3D in the bottom right corner and Get Orbit 3D at www.orbit-3d.com across the center.
WAVE GALLERY	A sheet of 15 wave presets for water, opened with EDIT WATER….
WELCOME sheet	The sheet that opens when Orbit starts, with the NEW SCENE, TYPE YOUR NAME, SCENE WIZARD and OPEN EXAMPLE cards. Opening a scene or object file from the Finder closes it.
Wind	One wind for the whole scene, set by DIRECTION and STRENGTH in the environment. It leans and sways plants and drifts clouds, fog banks and glow motes. Water can follow it with FOLLOW WIND.
Wireframe	A drawing of only the edges of each object's faces, as lines. The viewport can show one, and WIREFRAME MODE in RENDER SETTINGS exports one.