Terminology

Before I make any more posts, I want to drop some terminology because like infosec (my background), there is a lot of it in game dev. I'll probably have to come back and update this post as I learn new things (which is seriously daily).

The List

Animation:

• Skeleton - A skeletal mesh that represents an object that can be animated. 
• Bones / Sockets - Basically joints in the skeletal mesh that are used for determining how the skeleton can move.
• Rigging - The act of adding bones/sockets to a skeletal mesh. More details on wikipedia. 
• Will add more but I haven't even started learning it yet.

Modeling: 

• Transforming - Basically moving, scaling or rotating a mesh/actor. More details on how to do this from UE4's documentation. 
• Rotate - Rotation of an actor on x,y,z axes.
• Scale - The size of an actor on the x,y,z axes.
• Edge, Polygon, Surface, Face - Just look at this picture. 
• Mesh - The final product of that above image.
• UV Mapping - 2D representation of a 3D model, wikipedia.

Texturing:

• Materials - Something that is applied to an object to give it its visual appearance. Can control how light reacts to it, how bumpy it looks etc. Basically consider it a surface like wood or metal and what that looks like in various lighting conditions. A good write up is here, on UE4's documentation page.
• Normal Map - a type of bump map used to add various details to a texture so it is not necessary to add more polygons but still get depth to the image/texture. See wikipedia.
• Height Map - Also can be used in bump mapping to get elevation details out of an image, again see wikipedia.
• Ambient Occlusion - See blenders write up. 
• Specularity - How reflective a surface is. See wikipedia. 

Game Engine / UE4 Specific / 3D / Camera:

• Coordinate Space - UE4's documentation has a nice table of the various coordinate systems.
• View Frustum - Basically the field of view for the camera in the modeled world, wikipedia.
• Orthographic Projection - Representing a 3D object on a 2D plane (i.e. your computer screen). Again, wikipedia.
• Blueprints - Unreal Engine's Visual Scripting Language / System. It's awesome and i'll do a full post on it later. 
• Ray casting - Used to determine, for example a projectile's rotation/direction and how far it will travel. Not to be confused with raytracing (which I totally did). See wikipedia.