Chamfer and Bevel are pretty much interchangable (hehe - both refer to a small edge of about 45 degrees between two surfaces meeting at a greater angle).

Hard to be too non-technical here.  A normal is the appropriate (and only) term for a vector perpendicular to a plane).  You want to talk 3D modeling, you're talking 3D mathematics. :)

Point - a point in space defined by one or more numbers along basic axes (X,Y,Z defined by (0.0,1.0,0.0) for instance).

Vector - a point or a direction from some origin.

Vertex - a point belonging to a polygon or other surface.

Normal - a vector perpendicular (at 90 degrees) to a plane (a polygon is usually a plane surface).

Unit Vector - a vector 'normalized' so that it is within the distance range of 0.0 to 1.0.  Note the wordplay with 'normal' and 'normallized' - normals are normally normalized. ;P

Edge - a line segment that is part of the polygon boundary defined between two consecutive points in the vertex array (see Polygon vertex winding order below).

Polygon - the space enclosed by a set of points.

Triangle - a polygon of three sides.

Quad (Quadrangle) - a polygon of four sides.

N-gon - a polygon of more than four sides.  This is a 3D computer graphics term invented to distinguish between triangle-quads and polygons having more than four sides.  A polygon can't have less then three sides - this is a degenerate polygon.  Most 3D computer programs and games work best with triangles and quads.

Polygon vertex winding order - this is the order of the points (in an array, from first to last) that make up the polygon when viewed from the side of the polygon that is the same as the normal.

Convex - bulging out.

Concave - indented or pushed in.

It'd probably be more instructional to do some images, but I don't have time for a tutorial on this.  Maybe some can illustrate these definitions (or you can find something on Google - there should be tons of stuff either related to basic 3D mathematics or graphics that will define and illustrate these concepts).

C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot. C++ makes it harder, but when you do, you blow your whole leg off.

 -- Bjarne Stroustrup

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