2011

extents See drawing extents.
external reference (xref) A drawing file referenced by another drawing. (XREF)
extrusion A 3D solid created by sweeping an object that encloses an area along a linear
path.
face A triangular or quadrilateral portion of a surface object.
face color mode A setting in the visual style that controls how color is displayed on a face.
face style A setting in the visual style that defines the shading on a face.
facet The underlying structure of the face of a 3D solid, surface, or mesh. Facets can be
quadrilateral or triangular. Smoothing a mesh object increases the number of facets for each
face.
feature control frame The tolerance that applies to specific features or patterns of features.
Feature control frames always contain at least a geometric characteristic symbol to indicate
the type of control and a tolerance value to indicate the amount of acceptable variation.
fence A multisegmented line specified to select objects it passes through.
field A specialized text object set up to display data that may change during the life cycle
of the drawing. When the field is updated, the latest value of the field is displayed. (FIELD)
fill A solid color covering an area bounded by lines or curves. (FILL)
filters See coordinate filters.
final gathering Final gathering is an optional, additional step to calculating global
illumination. Using a photon map to calculate global illumination can cause rendering
artifacts such as dark corners and low-frequency variations in the lighting. You can reduce
or eliminate these artifacts by turning on final gathering, which increases the number of
rays used to calculate global illumination.
Final gathering can greatly increase rendering time. It is most useful for scenes with overall
diffuse lighting, less useful for scenes with bright spots of indirect illumination.
You turn on final gathering on the Advanced Render Settings palette. See also global
illumination.
First Contact balloon The interactive graphical tooltip that is displayed when the
SteeringWheel is pinned during startup.
fit points Locations that a B-spline must pass through exactly or within a fit tolerance. See
also interpolation points and approximation points.
2656 | Chapter 52 Glossary