Architectural Lighting Simulation Software

Rayfront User Manual

Importing Geometry from DXF Files

After selecting the file to import, a first dialog will ask you to specify the entity types that should be included, and some details about the meshing of curved surfaces and global scaling. After this, you can select from the layer names that have been found, to control precisely what should be done with the elements on each of them.

Geometry to Convert

With the first set of switches you can specify which entity types you wish to convert and what kind of surface they should get converted to. By default all entities that define a surface in Autocad (opaque for the hide/shade/render commands) are activated. Others that can be used to simplify modelling but are rendered differentely in Autocad than in RADIANCE are off and have to be enabled by the user explicitly. All polygons will keep their orientation unchanged, as determined by the right hand rule. Entities extruded by thickness will be inverted if their thickness value (or "PDSIZE" for point entities) is negative.

The meaning of the Entity Types is explained on a seperate page.

[dialog]

Import Settings:

The remaining settings specify the details of how the geometry data will be converted.

Distance Tolerance for arc approx:
Arc entities and arc segments of polylines have to be meshed for the use in RADIANCE. The value you enter here specifies how smooth these meshes will appear in the final image. Higher values will make smoother surfaces. The default of 0.1. It is recommended to make test for optimized settings balancing file size and visual accuracy, since the best settings depends on the size and scale of your model.

Angle Tolerance for arc approx:
The orientation (normal vector) of neighbouring mesh elements will not differ by more than this amount in degrees. The default is 15.0 degrees, which usually gives reasonable results. The effect of this setting is independent of model size and complexity. Please note that very low values (eg. below 2.0 degrees) will lead to unreasonably big output files and may cause further problems when running out of memory.

Scaling Factor:
The imported geometry will be scaled according to this factor. The value set here will be used as the default for future imports of views, measuring fields, and geometry data.

Note: It is highly recommended to scale all data imported into Rayfront to meter units, in order to avoid consistency problems with imported luminaires and the Raydirect plug-in.