You can save an NSC layout with rays in CAD format, and then import into your CAD package.  Here’s a good Knowledgebase article for SolidWorks and Autodesk Inventor:  How to show exported rays in SolidWorks and Autodesk Inventor.

Hi Jeff,

The thing here is that I use Ray Trace Control and  launch about 10e8 rays (#Analysis Rays in the NSC Editor) with it. I then obtain a zrd.file. This is this file/result I wan to look at in Catia. I do not want to use #Layout Rays in the NSC Editor, it is limited to 20k rays and it is not enough for my need.

Do you have a solution for this ? I hope my case is now a bit clarify,

Best regards,

Nicolas

Hi Nicolas,

Can you explain why you need to pass so many rays into your CAD program?  10^8 source rays is a *huge* number, especially if you are also using ray splitting and scattering.  The ZRD file will be massive.  Typically, one only passes enough rays into a CAD layout to provide adequate visualization of the beam path. 

The ZRD file is used internally by OpticStudio to allow for ray filtering operations.  For external use, the ZRD file would have to be parsed in order to extract all of the various ray segments.  As far as I know, this isn’t something that is done inside CAD software -- but could be done with some effort using C++, or by simply using the built-in conversion tool for Matlab:

Jeff