It is meant to describe the geometry and basic surface characteristics of objects, the placement of lights, and the viewing frustum for the eye. Comments, suggestions, and criticisms are all welcome. Rayshade also has an awk program to convert NFF to Rayshade's format. NFF is meant for testing efficiency schemes and so has minimal support for lighting and shading. By providing a minimal interface, NFF is meant to act as a simple format to allow the programmer to quickly write filters to move from NFF to the local file format.
Files are output as lines of text.
For each entity, the first field defines its type. The rest of the line and possibly other lines contain further information about the entity. These are explained in depth below. Mostly needed for hidden surface algorithms. Also, vectors are not required to be perpendicular to each other.