Jargon

Unless it’s destined to be a sculpture, a model without color will always be just a flat, lifeless collection of polygons and vertices.

Newsletter from Sketchup, Google's 3D drawing program, this morning notes that it has "a great set of UV mapping tools". UV Mapping? What's that? UV normally means Ultra-Violet light, which was what the cutting edge of microchip fabrication was using last week. Are we using Sketchup to design masks for wafer fabs now? Not quite.

UV mapping is the 3D modeling process of projecting a 2D image to a 3D model's surface. The letters "U" and "V" denote the axes of the 2D texture because "X", "Y" and "Z" are already used to denote the axes of the 3D object in model space. - Wikipedia