Artist Manual · Appendix A

Glossary

Term	Meaning
Solver group	All objects that carry the same Tnpix Solver instance. They are simulated together and can collide, layer and be stitched to each other.
TenPix Graph	The window opened by Graph on the Tnpix Solver panel: every Solver group of the scene, its objects and modifiers, with every TenPix setting editable there and every change in 3ds Max's undo.
Channel	A named weight map painted with Tnpix Channel, from 0 to 1 per vertex. Other modifiers read it by name.
Substep	A slice of a frame. Everything, collision included, is evaluated in every substep.
Iteration	One more pass over the constraints inside a substep. Time does not advance.
Contact pass	One round of contact resolution in a step.
Stretch ceiling	The largest stretch a fabric allows, set by max strain (Standard) or Max stretch (Advanced).
Hard pin / soft pin	A pin that holds its points completely (full paint, Weight 1), or partly (lighter paint or a lower Weight): a soft pin follows the share of the motion its paint times its Weight gives.
Preserve	A painted region that follows the animation below the Solver instead of being simulated (Tnpix Preserve); a point painted 1 sits on the animation and is ignored by every collision.
Blended frame	A frame 3ds Max never showed (after a jump ahead on the timeline), whose animation a Tnpix Preserve takes as a blend of the nearest frames it was shown; its status line names such frames.
Region (Volume)	A painted channel that a Tnpix Volume holds instead of the whole object, its volume measured against its Centre.
Rigid tack	A stitch at Tightness 0: the pair keeps its starting gap exactly.
Weakness	The Tear's multiplier on the pull or stretch at a marked point, between Weakness min and Weakness max: above 1 the point tears sooner.
Rest pose	The shape a modifier treats as undeformed: the rest length of the cloth, the rest volume of a shell, the rest shape Delta Mush restores.
Proxy	For Tnpix Collision, a decimated stand-in of a collider. For Tnpix Wrap, the low-resolution mesh that drives a detailed one.
Bind frame	The frame at which Tnpix Wrap records where each point sits on its proxy.
Flesh	The volume of small tetrahedra a Tnpix Soft Body makes inside a closed object, its corners the object's own points and more inside.
Fibre line	The line a soft body's fibres run along, from its Start object to its End object, or along the object's own length.
Activation	How hard a soft body's fibres work, from 0 to 1: they shorten and the body bulges across.
Tension point	Where along the fibre line a muscle tenses most, and bulges.
Tendon	The end of a muscle that does not contract and is much stiffer than its body.
True Geometry	The collision system that uses the collider's actual triangles, with no voxel field.
Voxel field (SDF)	A grid around a collider that stores the distance to its surface; used by the volume collision systems.
Unlimited ground	The Solver's endless floor at Z = 0: the cloth and its threads land on it with no ground object and no collider.
Delta Mush	Smoothing that removes noise from the simulated surface and then adds the modelled detail back.
Detangle	A finishing pass that brings cloth that went through other cloth back to its own side, then pushes layers closer than the thickness apart.
Retime / Posterize	Playing a cache at another speed, or in held steps, without simulating again.
Demo	TenPix Cloth without an activated licence: up to 25,000 vertices in the scene simulate, for the first 100 frames, on a workstation; caches save as .tnc; on a farm nothing simulates.
Demo build	The build of TenPix Cloth made for trying it (its About window reads rc-demo): the demo's limits are built in, it needs no licence and cannot be activated.
Warp / weft	The two families of threads in a woven cloth: warp runs along the grain, weft across it.
Threads object	A Tnpix Threads Object: the object that shows a cloth's thread tubes when Tubes go to is set to their own object.
Thread cap	The most threads one Tnpix Threads makes; past it, every crack is thinned alike.
Build number	The number in the About window that identifies the exact plug-in file 3ds Max loaded.

Term

Meaning

Solver group

All objects that carry the same Tnpix Solver instance. They are simulated together and can collide, layer and be stitched to each other.

TenPix Graph

The window opened by Graph on the Tnpix Solver panel: every Solver group of the scene, its objects and modifiers, with every TenPix setting editable there and every change in 3ds Max's undo.

Channel

A named weight map painted with Tnpix Channel, from 0 to 1 per vertex. Other modifiers read it by name.

Substep

A slice of a frame. Everything, collision included, is evaluated in every substep.

Iteration

One more pass over the constraints inside a substep. Time does not advance.

Contact pass

One round of contact resolution in a step.

Stretch ceiling

The largest stretch a fabric allows, set by max strain (Standard) or Max stretch (Advanced).

Hard pin / soft pin

A pin that holds its points completely (full paint, Weight 1), or partly (lighter paint or a lower Weight): a soft pin follows the share of the motion its paint times its Weight gives.

Preserve

A painted region that follows the animation below the Solver instead of being simulated (Tnpix Preserve); a point painted 1 sits on the animation and is ignored by every collision.

Blended frame

A frame 3ds Max never showed (after a jump ahead on the timeline), whose animation a Tnpix Preserve takes as a blend of the nearest frames it was shown; its status line names such frames.

Region (Volume)

A painted channel that a Tnpix Volume holds instead of the whole object, its volume measured against its Centre.

Rigid tack

A stitch at Tightness 0: the pair keeps its starting gap exactly.

Weakness

The Tear's multiplier on the pull or stretch at a marked point, between Weakness min and Weakness max: above 1 the point tears sooner.

Rest pose

The shape a modifier treats as undeformed: the rest length of the cloth, the rest volume of a shell, the rest shape Delta Mush restores.

Proxy

For Tnpix Collision, a decimated stand-in of a collider. For Tnpix Wrap, the low-resolution mesh that drives a detailed one.

Bind frame

The frame at which Tnpix Wrap records where each point sits on its proxy.

Flesh

The volume of small tetrahedra a Tnpix Soft Body makes inside a closed object, its corners the object's own points and more inside.

Fibre line

The line a soft body's fibres run along, from its Start object to its End object, or along the object's own length.

Activation

How hard a soft body's fibres work, from 0 to 1: they shorten and the body bulges across.

Tension point

Where along the fibre line a muscle tenses most, and bulges.

Tendon

The end of a muscle that does not contract and is much stiffer than its body.

True Geometry

The collision system that uses the collider's actual triangles, with no voxel field.

Voxel field (SDF)

A grid around a collider that stores the distance to its surface; used by the volume collision systems.

Unlimited ground

The Solver's endless floor at Z = 0: the cloth and its threads land on it with no ground object and no collider.

Delta Mush

Smoothing that removes noise from the simulated surface and then adds the modelled detail back.

Detangle

A finishing pass that brings cloth that went through other cloth back to its own side, then pushes layers closer than the thickness apart.

Retime / Posterize

Playing a cache at another speed, or in held steps, without simulating again.

Demo

TenPix Cloth without an activated licence: up to 25,000 vertices in the scene simulate, for the first 100 frames, on a workstation; caches save as .tnc; on a farm nothing simulates.

Demo build

The build of TenPix Cloth made for trying it (its About window reads rc-demo): the demo's limits are built in, it needs no licence and cannot be activated.

Warp / weft

The two families of threads in a woven cloth: warp runs along the grain, weft across it.

Threads object

A Tnpix Threads Object: the object that shows a cloth's thread tubes when Tubes go to is set to their own object.

Thread cap

The most threads one Tnpix Threads makes; past it, every crack is thinned alike.

Build number

The number in the About window that identifies the exact plug-in file 3ds Max loaded.