Hi, Mark.  It really does only spare us having to add the source ray to the NSCE.  It’s pretty helpful for setting up ray-based optimizations in nonsequential.  In my pre-zemax life, all of us did this frequently; for example, you might add a gut ray to position optics for an off-axis system.  Adding additional rays can cause the editor to get out of hand pretty quickly, though of course, hiding the rows helps.

Hi @David.Nguyen ,

Alright, got it. 

I will create a new topic. Thanks for the feedback!

Hi Zemax community,

Thanks a lot for providing access to the single ray tracing capabilities via API.

I was wondering if it is possible to run a sequence of single ray tracing events.

I am interested in tracing rays from the location of my source through my system but with specific ray directions that I manually define in python.

When I try this in python, it seems that the single ray tracing tool is always tracing the ray with the same direction (on axis ray)

My code looks something like this:

nscsrt = TheSystem.Analyses.New_Analysis(ZOSAPI.Analysis.AnalysisIDM.NSCSingleRayTrace)
nscsrt_settings = nscsrt.GetSettings()
nscsrt_settings.RaySourceX = 0.0
nscsrt_settings.RaySourceY = 0.0
nscsrt_settings.RaySourceZ = 0.0
nscsrt_settings.RefObject = 2

nscsrt_settings.SplitNSCRays = False
nscsrt_settings.ScatterNSCRays = False
nscsrt_settings.UsePolarization = Falsea

for i in range(0,100,1):        
     nscsrt_settings.RaySourceL = I_dir[0, i]
     nscsrt_settings.RaySourceM = I_dir[1, i]
     nscsrt_settings.RaySourceN = I_dir[2, i]


     nscsrt.ApplyAndWaitForCompletion()
     nscsrt_data = nscsrt.GetResults().NSCSingleRayTraceData


     data_segment1 = nscsrt_data.ReadSegmentFull(1)
     l_s1.append(data_segment1[10])
     m_s1.append(data_segment1[11])
     n_s1.append(data_segment1[12])

     data_segment2 = nscsrt_data.ReadSegmentFull(2)
     l_s2.append(data_segment2[10])
     m_s2.append(data_segment2[11])
     n_s2.append(data_segment2[12])

     data_segment3 = nscsrt_data.ReadSegmentFull(3)
     l_s3.append(data_segment3[10])
     m_s3.append(data_segment3[11])
     n_s3.append(data_segment3[12])

s1_dirs = np.stack((l_s1,m_s1,n_s1),axis=0)
s2_dirs = np.stack((l_s2,m_s2,n_s2),axis=0)
s3_dirs = np.stack((l_s3,m_s3,n_s3),axis=0)

In this case, I am interested in extracting the ray directions from 3 different segments in my system.

However, once I plot the results, I can observe that the single ray tracing tool is always tracing the same on axis ray. (The ray directions that I want to evaluate for are defined in the I_dir vector) You can see this in the following plot. Here I am plotting the x and y components of the direction vectors. The blue data corresponds to the ray directions I want to trace and the orange dot at the center is the result that I get from the single ray tracing analysis. As you would observe, I always obtain the on axis direction.

Any idea about what could be happening here? Can this be solved in any way?

Thanks for the help!

Thanks David, hopefully this means the rest of the NSC ray tracing via the API will be updated so calculations like NSC Sag Map, Angle of Incidence calculations or optical path length/wavefront analysis can be implemented in non-sequential mode without having to save a ZRD file.

Hey David,

Thanks for the update.  Did you forget to attach the sample code?  What I’m really looking for is if we have access to all 29 data points from the ReadNextSegmentFull which is covered by the IZRDReaderResults or if we’re still limited to the 13 data points for the SingleRayNormPolFull/SingleRayDirectPolFull from sequential mode? 

The developers would have had to add a new data structure to capture all 29 data points rather than reuse the old DDE code which the IRayTraceNSCData/IRayTraceNSCSourceData uses.  Right now, I cannot perform a full NSC ray trace in memory and get key data out like HitFace, Index, or Nxyz normal vectors, meaning for custom NSC analysis I have to save a ZRD file and parse it, which is really slow.  

Hoping this addition has changed the underlying code so all the NSC ray tracing via the ZOS-API is better!