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Hi, I’m trying to begin designing TIR lens with outer TIR surface and inner lens surface in small cylindrical hole. I guess most optical engineers understand what I mean by that. What is best approach to this in NSC. I’m thinking of three options.

  1. Use boolean combination of lenses and cylinder. I think this is illustrated in a KB article.
  2. Using freeform Z object with surface profiles parameters.
  3. Using part designer.

I guess there are pros/cons of each method above. I’m more interested in 2 and 3 which I didn’t see illustrated in any KB article or training materials for OpticStudio yet. What are your thoughts and recommendations?

Try the BOOLEAN NATIVE option first.  BOOLEAN CAD could work but raytracing speed is slower.    


User defined object/ surface is another option for fast optimization purpose though the modelling might be

a little complicate. see the article here on ARtrix and Zemax:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/artrix-tir-toolbox-haifeng-ding-8kkkc/?trackingId=md6AK5RuSQayBhTrKb21EA%3D%3D


Try the BOOLEAN NATIVE option first.  BOOLEAN CAD could work but raytracing speed is slower.    

That’s what I tried first before. It works to some extent but it’s quite limited or cumbersome when trying to create more complex inner lens surface.


User defined object/ surface is another option for fast optimization purpose though the modelling might be

a little complicate. see the article here on ARtrix and Zemax:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/artrix-tir-toolbox-haifeng-ding-8kkkc/?trackingId=md6AK5RuSQayBhTrKb21EA%3D%3D

Thanks for this useful article. Very interesting and impressive indeed. It seems like a special toolbox the author developed to work with Zemax. but question is how available this is to us.


Does anyone know if the KB article on the TIR lens design/optimization still exists? I recall reading that in the past but I couldn’t find that any more in the KB site and no example file in the Zemax samples/courses folder if I’m not mistaken.


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