Michael Cheng provides a great how-to when using optically fabricated holograms (OFH). I downloaded the associated zip file from his post (here). The files are saved in the ZMX format. When you load the playback ZMX file, it will throw an error message saying that it can’t find the construction files even though they are correctly named in the comment line of the LDE. It appears that the reason is because they are saved as ZMX files and not the newer ZOS file. It appears that this is recent change since as I don’t remember having this issue before I installed the Ansys version of Zemax OpticStudio (currently running 2022 R2.02). I guess this is a bug; however, I don’t know that for certain.

Is there a reason that Zemax can’t use the ZMX format for the OFH surface?

(Update 1, 2023-02-20): I have done a fresh install and now Zemax is asking for the ZMX format instead of the ZOS format when I load and OFH playback file. I have tried toggling the default file format between ZOS and ZMX; however, this does not change anything. So it seems that Zemax can use the ZMX format for the construction files; however, it can’t look for both ZOS and ZMX and how to tell it which one to look for is still unknown.

(Update 2, 2023-02-20): At least part of the issue appear to be saving the files on a server as opposed to saving them locally. Update 1 is resolved by opening the files from the local hard drive instead.