Modelling/3D
polys - polycount - polygons - tris
About: A 'polycount' is the total amount of 3-sided 'faces' the model has. More often than most, people will not realise the 'polycount' must be 3-sided faces. (i.e. a 'triangulated' version of your model) This mistake is commonly made as the 'triangulating' as automatically done when exporting to .SMD.
ngon
About: An 'ngon' is a 'face' with 5 or more sides. It is highly recommended that your model does not have any of these on an 'organic' model, as it is likely to cause smoothing errors.
Organic
About: Organic is just a term used to describe smooth and curvy models, rather than a model with sharp corners and flat faces. As the term 'organic' suggests, humans, animals and cloth (if wrinkled) are covered in this category. Organic models are usually created by starting with a 'plane' and then the edges are extruded. This just makes it easier to follow muscle contours etc.
Smoothing - Smoothing Groups - Normals
About: These all mean the same thing, so I will refer to them as Normals. Normals are used to give the appearance of smooth/hard looking faces/edges. For example, a disco ball would have 'hard' normals and a pearl would have 'smooth' normals. Most modelling applications edit normals differently, but the basic meaning behind them is the same. Misuse of these can cause 'smoothing errors', these usually look like large dark streaks. (which is bad) Normals are assigned within a modelling application before exporting to SMD.
LOD - Level of Detail
About: LOD is short for 'Level of Detail'. LOD SMDs usually have the following prefix in their file name; lod(number)_ -- the higher the number, the lower poly the model should be and therefore the further away it should be used.
LODs are exported and created exactly like reference SMDs, but have a different purpose. LODs are merely lower poly versions that the main 'reference' model will switch to when you are at a certain distance from it. These are used for optimisation purposes.
A common amount used for characters is 5-6 LODs. Whereas props normally have a maximum of 3, depending on the complexity of them.
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Skinning/Texturing/Materials/2D
VMT - .vmt
About: VMT is an abbreviation for 'Valve Material Texture'. VMTs and VTFs are a package deal, in the sense that VTFs contain all texture data, and VMTs tell the VTF what to do. VMTs are simple text files that can be created/opened in notepad or any other simple text editors. VMTs consist of a 'Shader' and 'Parameters'. See the
VMT glossary for details.
VTF - .vtf
About: VTF, short for Valve Texture File. You can consider this the 'compiled' texture file for HL2. (TGAs are the 'uncompiled' materials) VTFs do not work by themselves, each one needs a (VMT) .vmt to tell it what to do. Such as, where the vtf is located, whether to have phong, envmapping, normal maps, self illumination etc etc.
TGA - .tga
About: TGA, short for Targa (truevision) texture format. You can consider this the 'uncompiled' texture file for HL2. TGAs are used rather than other formats as it has no compression and retains the Alpha channel.
Alpha (channel)
About: Images usually consist of at least 3 channels, RGB. (Red, Green, Blue) However, .TGAs/.VTFs allow for a 4th, greyscale layer to be used. This channel is called an 'Alpha Channel'. It can be used for defining: transparency, self illumination, phong (specular), envmapping (reflections), and more. What you want the alpha channel to do, depends on what commands you define in the .vmt.
Hex - Hexed - Hexing
About: To sum it up, this means to 'duplicate' a model so you can apply a different skin to it, while still retaining the ability to spawn the original at the same time. This is done by extracting the models/materials from a .gcf file, opening the model files up with a hex editor (Hex Workshop, XVI32 etc.), editing the material/model paths/names (each path/name must retain the same amount of characters - kathar = 6 etc.), then the 'edited' skin is applied via editing VMTs' contents and changing their directory etc.
