This isn’t a fully formulated ask but reaching to the community for any tips or tricks.

To identify and control intermediate image planes, I’ve tried adding dummy surfaces with their position driven by a marginal ray crossing [PARY PY=1, Target = 0] in the merit function. This works OK, but it seems computationally expensive. I’d rather just have the thickness be a solve like the ‘normal’ marginal ray solve, which only works for images after the stop…

Another topic, more generally, is that dummy surfaces can get in the way of boundary operands by unnecessarily driving clearances. Especially when leveraging the merit function wizard, one must go and find the dummy surfaces each time and remove their operands and/or weight. This there an easy way to ignore boundary operands for dummy surfaces?

Thank for any advice,

John