The VFNODEDAT file corresponds to a Patran Thermal DEFNOD file. You may refer to the Patran Thermal User’s Guide for the description of that file.

The VFNODEDAT file is a FORTRAN Formatted Sequential Access file. The file may contain comment lines which will be ignored by Patran Thermal. Comment lines begin with the character ; or *. Viewfactor creates at most one line of data in VFNODEDAT. If no new radiosity nodes are created by Viewfactor, then no data is output to VFNODEDAT, but a commented message that no new nodes were created is output. Data lines in VFNODEDAT follow the FORMAT (1X, A10, 3I10). The first character field contains the string 'DEFNOD'. The three integer fields contain the beginning node number, the ending node number, and the node number increment in that order for the nodes being defined. For Viewfactor, the node number increment is always 1 and the ending node number is always greater than the beginning node number.