Some Important Things that May not be Obvious

While I have tried to make these help files as complete as possible, there are occasionally some things that are obvious to me (having writtin the software) and only me. Here are a few of the tricky non-obvious things that have come up. If you have any questions or suggestions for this list, please contact me, Jeff Cotter.

Layers Must be Light-tight. See here for more details.

Planes are One-sided. See here for more details.

InLayer versus {x, y, z}. The position of a ray has nothing to do with which Layer that RaySim thinks its inside. See here for more details.

All Rays Start with InLayer = 0. All rays start inside your first Layer. See here for more details.

Use the 'h' Key if You Lose or Can't See Your Rendered Model. There are many controls to render the Model. See here for more details.

You can Undock the Document View pane and the Trace Legend. Make some space in the Rendering pane. Just click-hold either pane or bar and drag to undock.

When Using Copy/Paste, first create an empty Batch, Layer or Plane to copy into. Note, there's no undo if you paste into the wrong Batch, Layer or Plane (yet).

Use Re-seed, to change the random numbers used in a simulation. Each time RaySim begins a simulation, it seeds the random number generator with a specific value. If you repeat the simulation, you will get the same answers because of the RaySim uses the same seed value. This allows you to "freeze" a trace and move it around on the Rendering pane. Re-seed will change the seed value, giving RaySim a different set of random numbers.

Thread Conflicts. The trace simulator runs in a separate thread from the RaySim GUI. This allows you to start a simulation and still carry on doing other useful (light duty) work on your computer, such as word processing. Some applicatons will conflict with RaySim, causing the simulation thread to slow down significantly. RaySim threads will interefer with each other, for example, so it's generally not a good idea to run more than one instance of the RaySim trace simulation thread. Some CD music players also interfere with the RaySim trace simulation thread.

Model Building and Editing is not possible from the Results View. Switch to the Document/Model View to edit.

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