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.

Then I talked to graphic programmers. The world I knew shattered to pieces. Literally. Those solid-looking shapes I'd been happily pushing and pulling for years? Not solid. Not even connected. Just points in 3D space, grouped into triangles, moving together while remaining fundamentally separate. The mesh - the thing I thought I understood completely - was an illusion the renderer was constructing 30+ times a second.

At this point there wasn’t even a model. It was trigonometry.

Read Mode: https://0byte.io/articles/many_meanings_of_model.html