What is a Model, Material, Shader & Texture
Notes:
Assets: Model, Material, Shader, Texture:
Model:
Model defines surface of a 3 dimensional object created in 3D software like Maya, Max, Blender, cinema4D, etc.
Ex: FBX, OBJ, DAE, DXF etc
FBX (FilmBoX),
OBJ (Object) ,
DAE (Digital Asset Exchange),
DXF (Drawing Exchange Format)
Material:
Material defines various properties like references to the textures, tiling of textures, color tints, lighting etc. for a model.
The available properties for a Material depends up on, which Shader the Material is using (or associated with).
Shader:
Shader is a small script responsible for calculating the Color of each pixel to be rendered, based on the lighting input, textures referred by material, tiling, color tints and other material configurations.
Texture:
Texture is an image that wraps around a model
Ex: BMP, JPEG, PNG, GIF, TIFF, TGA, PSD, etc.
BMP: Bitmap
JPEG: Joint Photographic Expert Group
PNG: Portable Network Graphics
GIF: Graphics Interchange Format
TIFF: True Image File Format
TGA: Targa File Format
PSD : PhotoShop Document