M

Mach bands

Bands of color that are not smoothly blended across a 3-D primitive.

material

A property that determines how a surface reflects light. A material has two components: an emissive property (whether it emits light) and a specular property, whose brightness is determined by a power setting.

mesh

A set of faces, each of which is described by a simple polygon.

mipmap

Also known as MIP map (Latin: multum in parvo, translated "much in little"). A sequence of textures, each of which is a progressively lower-resolution, prefiltered representation of the same image. A higher-resolution image is used when a visible object is close to the viewer; as the object moves farther away (and gets smaller), lower-resolution images are used.

mixing

In DirectSound, the process of combining sound buffers that are playing and writing the result to the primary sound buffer, which supplies the sound hardware with audio data. There are no limitations to the number of buffers that can be mixed, except the practicalities of available processing time.

Mode X

A hybrid display mode derived from the standard VGA Mode 13. This mode allows the use of up to 256 KB of display memory (rather than 64 KB allowed by Mode 13) by using the VGA display adapter's EGA multiple video plane system.

model coordinates

Coordinates that are relative to local origin. See also model space and world coordinates.

model space

The frame of reference, used by model coordinates, that uses vertices relative to a single 3-D model's local origin.

multipass texture blending

The repeated rendering of a 3-D primitive while blending on a texture with each pass. This technique is widely used to achieve a variety of special effects.