A vertex is a point of a mesh — the atom of renderable geometry. It is a position, and usually more: a vertex commonly carries a normal for lighting, UV coordinates for texturing, and sometimes a colour or skinning weights. These are its attributes, and naming which attributes a vertex may carry is part of what the Gargontology has to do.
The vertices property of a mesh is an ordered list with elements of type vertex. The ordering is load-bearing rather than incidental: triangles are defined by indices into that list, so a vertex’s position in it is its identity, and sharing one vertex between adjacent triangles is what makes a mesh a connected surface rather than a pile of loose triangles.
External links#
Similar concepts and prior art:
- Vertex (computer graphics) on Wikipedia
- Vertex buffer object — how attribute arrays reach the GPU
- glTF accessors — a worked encoding of indexed, typed attribute arrays
- UV mapping and surface normals — the two attributes almost every vertex carries