Rayfront User Manual

Variations within a Project

What's in a variation

A project can contain several variations. A variation selects any number of geometry objects, assigns materials and modifiers to them and puts a sky on top. All those components are defined in the project context, and editing them will change their meaning for all variations that use them. What the variation does, is to collect them together in a specific combination.

Let's say for example that we have a material called "wall_paint". We can apply this material to all the wall objects that we have included in variation A. Now if we want the same walls in variation B to get a rougher surface, then it wouldn't be a good idea to modify the material "wall_paint", since the goal might exactly be to compare the effects of various wall surfaces between the two variations. Consequently, we will create a new material, eg. "wall_plaster", and apply this one to the walls in variation B. If there is one wall in variation B that should still have a painted finish, there's nothing to keep us from using "wall_paint" here as well, just for that object (assuming that this wall is indeed a seperate object from the other walls).

Most simulation parameters are also defined in the variation context, except those that vary with the simulation type. For each variation, we can select a view (camera) to render an image, or set up a measuring field to run a numerical simulation. We can run several simulations for each variation, using different views and measuring fields. Most simulations can even run in parallel, eg. on different machines on the network.