A user found much faster way of micro lens array object for NSC ray tracing. That is CAD part. If you have mechanical CAD, like Creo or AutoCAD, micro lens array can be modeled, then the STEP file can be imported into OpticStudio NSC mode.

He created 2 type of STEP file of MLA. One is 1 STEP file of whole MLA. The other one is 4 STEP files for four quadrant of MLA.

Disadvantage of STEP file is not availbale for parametric modification though, the calculation speed helps us for quick analysis of illumination system.

I’m curious what the developers say about this. It’s the opposite to the way it ‘should’ be.

Yes, I have the same problem. When the pitch of the lenslet array is small and the number of arrays is large, my computer barely works(i 7+16GB).

@Mark.Nicholson , @522721806 , thank you for feedback!

Yes, I was also thinking calculation speed should be “Array” > “Lenslet Array” > “CAD”, but the test case shows totally oppsite results. I’ve asked developers about slowness of “Array” than “Lesnlet Array”. The answer was as below.
“Array does have to do a lot of looping through the different positions. The Array object can only make optimizations that are true for the general case -- i.e. that hold true regardless of the parent object -- while the lenslet array can analytically calculate (I believe) which sub-lens it will intersect with, so it should generally be much faster than the Array to trace.

I would expect the Array object to be slower for any dimensions, but the only way to say for sure is to test it.

There are likely ways to speed up the ray trace for the Array, but it would take some dedicated research time to try out various options.  Some of those options may require significant up-front calculations so it might trade off lens update time for ray trace performance.  That may be worthwhile for running a single ray trace, but may not be worth it when trying to optimize the system.”

I haven’t asked about Array/Lenslet Array vs CAD, but it may be simply CAD is faster than these native objects because it inlcudes just one position and geometry.

BTW, CAD export from OpticStudio didn’t wrok for 4900 MLA with my machine. The conversion process looks very heavy and I need to stop OpticStudio from task manager. Please ask mechanical engineer to create the MLA object with mechanical CAD.

That does sound odd. The array object should ray trace much faster than the Lenslet Array object, and it did when we first released it, otherwise it wouldn’t have been released. It’s possible though that subsequent work has sped up the native lenslet array. It’s also possible that subsequent work slowed down the array object. It would be good to know which.

I’ve forwarded your question to dev team though, the answer was that we don’t have clear insight on that. Comparison the historical performance of the Array and Lenslet Array will require long time.

I want to trace the case, but unfortunately it may be difficult to improve the trade-off in short term. I hope we can recieve more feedback from users. Thank you!