Road Graphic Log File

The Road Tools writes a log file named Road_graphic.log to the directory containing the input road file.  The log file contains information about the input road file, the output driver path file or road graphics files, and any errors encountered while processing the input road file.  If you process more than one road file in the same directory, the log file contains information for last file processed.

Sharing Binary Road Data Files

If you share binary road data files across platforms (MacIntosh or Linux to Windows), then using WinZip on a Windows machine to extract binary road data files from TAR files can corrupt the road data files.  WinZip's default TAR file smart CR/LF conversion features may insert CR/LF characters at improper locations in the binary road description file causing the corruption.  Therefore, we recommend disabling this feature when unzipping TAR'd binary road files from MacIntosh or Linux computers on a Windows computer.

TAR file smart CR/LF conversion - When selected, this option determines if "smart" CR/LF conversion should be performed when extracting from TAR files.  CR/LF is short for Carriage Return/Line Feed, the standard end of line indicator.  When the TAR File smart CR/LF conversion option is in effect, WinZip determines whether to perform CR/LF conversion file inside a TAR file by looking at the first 80 characters in each file.  If the file is a text file, then single LF and CR characters are converted to CR/LF pairs so the file can be viewed by Notepad and other Windows viewers.  This results in file corruption of road description file.

Click on the following link to view WinZip's online help and updates.

Wavefront Object File

OBJ (or .OBJ) is a geometry definition file format first developed by Wavefront Technologies for its Advanced Visualizer animation package.

The OBJ file format is a simple data format that represents 3D geometry alone — namely, the position of each vertex, the UV position of each texture coordinate vertex, vertex normals, and the faces that make each polygon defined as a list of vertices, and texture vertices.  Vertices are stored in a counter-clockwise order by default, making explicit declaration of face normals unnecessary.  OBJ coordinates have no units, however OBJ files can contain scale information in a human readable comment line.

The most commonly encountered OBJ files contain only polygonal faces.  To describe a polygon, the file first describes each point with the "v" keyword, then describes the face with the "f" keyword.  The line of a face command contains the enumerations of the points in the face, as 1-based indices into the list of points, in the order they occurred in the file.  For example, the following describes a simple triangle:

# Simple Wavefront file

v 0.0 0.0 0.0

v 0.0 1.0 0.0

v 1.0 0.0 0.0

f 1 2 3

It is also possible to reference points using negative indices.  This makes it easy to describe the points in a face, then the face, without the need to store a large list of points and their indexes.  In this way, "v" commands and "f" commands can be interspersed.

v -0.500000 0.000000 0.400000

v -0.500000 0.000000 -0.800000

v -0.500000 1.000000 -0.800000

v -0.500000 1.000000 0.400000

f -4 -3 -2 -1