Scene

Definitions

1. In computer graphics and game development, the complete description of a virtual world at a moment: its objects, meshes, materials, lights, cameras, and the spatial relationships between them. Scenes are usually organised as a scene graph, a tree in which each node holds a local transform relative to its parent, so moving a car node moves its wheels with it. Engines walk this structure every frame to compute world positions, cull objects outside the camera's view, batch similar draw calls, and hand the result to the renderer. The word also names the unit of content in engines: a Unity scene is a level or screen saved as an asset, while Godot builds entire games from nested, reusable scenes. File formats such as glTF organise their contents into scenes, and Pixar's Universal Scene Description (USD) has become the interchange standard for composing large scenes across tools in film and visual effects.

   In plain English: Everything that makes up a 3D world in a game or app — the objects, lights, and camera — organized in a tree structure.

   Example: "We loaded the GLTF file and added it to the Three.js scene with default lighting."

Related Terms

• Draw
• Frame Rate
• Input Map
• Physics Body
• Physics Engine
• Shader
• Sprite
• Tween
• Render Loop
• Vertex
• Blender