Bones - an actual skeletal system you set up to help control movement realistically and to keep things in order. An outline for you to base the rest of the shapes of the objects on.
Camera - do I really have to go into detail about this? OK, maybe a little. The camera serves as an object through which to view the other objects of the scene. You can have more than one, and probably should do so. Cameras are hugely important in how you want to present and therefore speak your message, or show your talent. A creative perspective can turn an ordinary block into so much more. It's exactly like being the director of your film, because you are! You're making a movie, didn't you know that? Except that in this movie, you are God with all that it contains. It's fun being God, believe me.
Falloff - has to do with light sources. The falloff is the spot where the light hits the object. I know there's probably more to it than that, but I'm not going to waste my life trying to find out. I'd rather waste my life defining what a line is.
Key - an important factor in the animation part of the project. Each key you create stands for the beginning and the end of each separate action you wish to instill in the object. This is a HUGE step up in user-friendliness, as opposed to the old ways of animating things frame by frame like a cartoon. It's a lot more orderly too. Let's say you put a key at 10 seconds into the film. This key could now stand for the end of an action that started from 0 seconds, and if you add another key seconds later, the beginning of a whole new one. And in between these keys you can do SO MUCH at one time it's so sweet. Of course you have to have a program that supports keys. Most made in the last decade do.
Lofted Object - this one's a little complex. Maybe even more than the Motion Capturing. Well, it took me a long time to figure out how to use it and just what it was actually doing. A lofted object sub-consists of two things: a shape, and a line/track telling it how to form into a 3D shape. The shape is used for the base on what the object is going to look like if you were to take a cross section of it. The line is used to tell that shape to follow along its path and create a whole new 3D one in the process. Ummm...ok, see if you can get this: Let's say the shape we're using is going to be a circle, and the line/track is going to be just a straight line going vertically. From here, can you guess what shape will form when you converge the two? No? OK...what's basically going to happen when you combine the two, or loft them, is that the circle will sort of drag itself along that line, leaving its shape solid all the way to the end. It's like if you have a whole bunch of plates with little holes in their centers (obviously they weren't meant for dinner, because the food would fall right through, but let's just say), and you're going to stack them on a bar, going vertically. Now, do you know what shape that makes? THAT'S RIGHT! A CYLINDER! If you were to take a square as the shape, and a shorter line as the track, you'd get - that's right a cube! A small circle with a long line makes a pole. A rectangle with a long line makes a building, or else a cubic rectangle, I'm just trying to be creative here. But the beauty of it is that you're not limited to concrete shapes and straight lines. You could make a wiggly blob as the shape (has to be enclosed though, or else some problems can occur), and a squiggle for the track. Now that's an original 3D object. The only bad thing is that the ends of the object will always turn out flat.
Material - a material is kind of like a real material, or sheet of cloth, or so. A material is the texture you want to put on any certain object. For a tree, use a grainy, wood material, and the foliage can be a grassy material, stretched out. Materials are important to add a huge amount of realism to the scene. Without materials the scene just really isn't much fun to look at. What would a paved road be without a few loose pebbles, or craggly holes? Think of that same road gray, blank, bland. Looks as slippery as a gym floor, that's not right. See? Materials are what give objects a real-world look. Things would look way too much like toys without them.
Motion Capture - a very expensive alternative to the hassle of controlling every aspect of object animation. Motion Capturing is used by the big shots of the movie and video game industry like George Lucas's ILM Studios, or Squaresoft. Jar Jar Binks of Star Wars: Episode 1 The Phantom Menace would have moved unbelievably unrealistic if he didn't take advantage of motion capturing. Motion capturing is basically this: The object to be animated is pre-created just like normal but then the producers bring a real human or animal in, strap a whole bunch of infared sensors to key points where animation has been studied to affect the rest of the parts of the body (like a few sensors might go on the upper and lower lips of a object for perfect-looking talking, and maybe some more on the brows to create realistic frowns and blinks, or one for each of the parts of each finger to make it look stunningly fluid when a character moves to point at something). The infared sensors read directly into a receiver or computer and what's recorded is where each sensor hit point A, point B, point C and so on and when, while the human or animal was in action. Those stats are then applied to the same parts on the CG object, and the data is applied to keys at the right times. This whole process eventually tells the CG object to move in almost the most identical possible way as the real world object. The affects of this process are truly amazing. Just stunning. But did I mention it's VERY EXPENSIVE, and we'll probably never get our hands on it.
Ray Trace Shadow- a type of shadow effect consisting of a hard, solid shadow. Ray Traced can make reflections look much more realistic and volumetric. Expect a long rendering time, because ray trace means the program's tracking the rays of the light source and applying shadows accordingly, very precise but sometimes you might want to use...
Ring Array - just that, a ring array. Only it's a ring of 4 cubes rotating around a central cube. This is probably used for, ah....who am I kidding, I don't know. Seriously, if anyone can explain to me what this is for, please send me E-MAIL telling me.
Shadow Maps - sort of the opposite of Ray Traced. Consists of soft, fuzzy, foggy shadows to give it more of a realistic look that there is not only one light source. Faster rendering than it's brother, but it can be a bit off on preciseness and can look kind of stupid if the falloff (described later)of a light source isn't just right. Shadow Maps don't trace the rays, they're quickly determined by where the object is, where the light is, what angle it's at, and how far away they are from each other.
Sphere - a 3-dimenaional circle, a ball, if you will. Probably the type of object that would most stand out in a scene because of the reflective state of it and the fact that it reflects everything around it.
Torus - basically a 3D donut shape, like a life saver, or ring, or a.....donut. Just one of the many interesting shapes you can use.
Track - the measuring window on which you place the keys of your animation. You can move keys back or forward to cut off the animation at certain, exact points, or to increase their speed.
Weighted Vertices - currently getting more info on this