A mesh (polygon mesh) is a collection of vertices, edges and faces that defines the shape of a polyhedral object in 3D computer graphics and solid modeling. The faces consist of triangles (triangle mesh), quadrilaterals (quads), or other simple convex polygons (n-gons), since this simplifies rendering.

Objects created with polygon meshes must store different types of elements. These include vertices, edges, faces, polygons and surfaces.


vertex

A position (usually in 3D space) along with other information such as color, normal vector and texture coordinates.


edge

A connection between two vertices.


face

A closed set of edges, in which a triangle face has three edges, and a quad face has four edges.

polygon - surfaces

A polygon is a coplanar set of faces. In systems that support multi-sided faces,polygons and surfaces are equivalent.

UV coordinates

UV coordinates are a separate 2d representation of the mesh "unfolded" to show what portion of a 2-dimensional texture map to apply to different polygons of the mesh. It is also possible for meshes to contain other such vertex attribute information such as color, tangent vectors, weight maps to control animation, etc (sometimes also called channels).