May 3rd, 2023
1 Tools, Features, and Capabilities
1.1 Composite Surface: Support for Splines and NURBS (All Editions)
Directly tolerance the surface irregularity of more complex physical surface types.
The following surfaces can now be used as Add-on surfaces and as Composite Base, giving more flexibility in creating new surface shapes, and more options for adding novel perturbations for tolerancing and analysis:
- Cubic Spline
- Extended Cubic Spline
- TrueFreeForm
- Toroidal NURBS
- Radial NURBS
Cubic Spline and Extended Cubic Spline are rotationally-symmetric surfaces defined by sag versus radial coordinate, allowing for novel radially-symmetric surface shapes. TrueFreeForm allows optimization of a sampled surface into any form, breaking free of equation-based definitions of the surface. Radial and Toroidal NURBS are two types of Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines that use control points to efficiently define curved surfaces.
1.2 Creo 9 Dynamic Link Support (Premium and Enterprise Editions)
Dynamically modify and optimize parts and assemblies created with PTC Creo Parametric 9.
With OpticStudio Premium and Enterprise you can dynamically open PTC Creo Parametric part and assembly files in Non-Sequential Mode in order to model and parametrically control objects that aren't easily modelled by primitive or common shapes. The native CAD part is easily incorporated into the Non-Sequential Component Editor using the associated object type. Any explicit dimensions defined on the object can be exposed and controlled within the Non-Sequential Component Editor. This will allow optical engineers to be able to work with the same files that their mechanical engineers use, without the need for format conversion.
OpticStudio now supports dynamic links to PTC Creo Parametric 9, as well as to the following legacy releases of the software: Creo Parametric 8, 7, 6, 5, and 4. To modify the Creo version to be used, simply set the path to your preferred Creo installation in the OpticStudio Preferences.
2 Performance and Stability Improvements
- Export to Speos Lens System – Stability improvements are included that allow better performance and compatibility with the Speos reduced order model v2.0. The algorithm was revised to ensure the system can be evaluated through the entire sensor when the sensor is larger. If a larger than expected sensor size is entered, the code can now handle the larger field of view and the generated reduced order model will reflect the vignetting of the system as it evaluates the image at larger sensor sizes. This update also allows to obtain computed values in some systems that used to report NaNs as part of the computation improving the export capability to Speos. Another performance aspect is that the pupil of the system is now reduced to more accurate parameters that allow better reverse ray trace in Speos of different wavelengths allowing to obtain better results in Speos for multiwavelength imagers.
- Extensions – Extensions based on Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) have long been deprecated by both Zemax and Microsoft; starting with Zemax OpticStudio 15, we stopped providing new capabilities or bug fixes. With the release of Ansys Zemax OpticStudio 2022 R2, DDE functionality and Extensions were removed, therefore DDE scripts are no longer supported. With Ansys OpticStudio 2023 R1.03, any remaining traces of the functionality are now completely cleaned up - from the UI, the data files, as well as the Help Files. Please note that any DDE scripts will need to be converted to the ZOS-API to run. This includes converting user-defined operands from UDOP to UDOC. For information on converting your scripts, see this Knowledgebase Article. In general, we highly recommend that any users wishing to write their own applications to work with OpticStudio use the ZOS-API, which is a much more secure and powerful tool based on the latest available programming technologies.
3 Bug Fixes
- Composite Surface – Fixed an issue where optimizing a Composite Surface with multiple configurations did not affect all configurations. Now if multiple configurations are set to be optimized in the Merit Function, then optimizing will correctly change the value of the variables for each configuration of the Composite Surface.
- STAR – Fixed an issue in the ZOS-API where loading temperature FEA data on top of existing temperature dataset led to an undefined state. Now if a new file is loaded the previous dataset is automatically unloaded first.
- STAR – Fixed an issue in STAR ray tracing to deformed surfaces where non-physical discontinuities could appear in calculation results.
- Surface Sag – Added an option to the ZOS-API to remove the Composite Sag in the Surface Sag and the Surface Sag Cross Section analyses.
- Diffraction DLL: lumerical-sub-wavelength-dynamic-link-2023R1-3.dll – Fixed an issue where using negative values for Max Order X and Max Order Y caused some systems to work incorrectly. To learn more about these two parameters, see this Knowledgebase Article.
- Diffraction DLL: lumerical-sub-wavelength-dynamic-link-2023R1-3.dll – A sign convention for the electric field was updated so that coherent addition of electric fields will be consistent between Lumerical’s RCWA solver and OpticStudio.
