Welcome
Welcome to the October edition of the Zemax’s Community newsletter!
This newsletter provides updates for you, the user, on items you might find interesting or helpful from the last month! Check out each of these items below:
Is there something else you’d like to see? Let us know in the comments below!
Where is September Community Update?
You haven’t missed anything! We felt it was a bit awkward to publish our newsletter at the end of the month. So we skipped the September month and are starting afresh with the October one. There hasn’t been any Ask An Engineer event this month as we are working on a new format.
David reaches the Luminary rank
Last month, David reached the Luminary rank. He is the 1st to reach that rank. Congratulations
The ranks and badges can be found under
Featured Community Posts: Converters
We have seen many requests on the support this month about the ZBF file. ZBF stands for Zemax Beam File. That file describes an array of electric fields and can be used as an input or output for the Physical Optics Propagation (POP) analysis. We are working on codes to create ZBF files, but some interesting posts already exist!
Have a look below:
Chinese forum
公差分析時會看到的Root Sum Square (RSS) 有什麼意義？
Japanese forum
8オンラインセミナー] スキュー光線を用いたガウシアンビームをOpticStudio
Knowledgebase Updates
- Designing Cell phone Camera Lenses Part 1: Optics by
@Sandrine Auriol
- Designing Cell phone Camera Lenses Part 2: Optomechanical Packaging with OpticsBuilder by
@Flurin Herren
Zemax-er Spotlight: Alissa Wilczynski
This month, we are featuring
Alissa was part of the US support engineers when I started at Zemax and she is now focusing on the digital customer experience. Alissa is one of the “founding member” of our community space. She is a very inspiring and positive person, and is always keen to try new things so that users can find quicker solutions to their questions.
To learn more about her, click Show content below.
Tell us about yourself
I've been in the software simulation business since 2011 when I joined Zemax as a support engineer. I was the leader of Zemax's support and services team until spring 2021 and have since been focused on improving our customer experience, especially the digital customer experience.
What industry trends are you excited about? Or what excites you about the optics industry in general?
Of all the industries and applications that OpticStudio and OpticsBuilder can address, I've always been most interested in healthcare. Simulation as a whole, not just optical simulation, really holds amazing possibilities for improving the safety and efficacy of surgical and medical interventions that have a huge impact on human life and quality of life.
If you could offer one piece of advice to someone using OpticStudio, what would it be?
There are lots of settings and options, and the best way to know if you've gotten them right is by systematically changing them and noting how your results differ. For example, the number of rays/sampling is very important. But don't set your sampling to the highest value all the time; you'll spend too much of your valuable time waiting for the computations. Instead, gradually increase your sampling and look at the results each time. What you should find is that as you continue to increase your sampling, the change in your result becomes smaller and smaller with each increment. You want to choose a high enough sampling that the incremental change is negligible for your purposes.
What topics are you looking forward to discussing with your fellow Community members?
I would love to learn more from other community members about the end products that they are creating. It would be so interesting to see the range of our community's impact!
What do you enjoy most about the Zemax Community/forums?
I appreciate that we have a space for all of our users to connect and help one another. Sometimes our community members don't need technical support from Zemax; they need advice about a specific application or system. If they can get that advice from someone who has done it before, that's really powerful! That's where I believe the community has a unique value.
Don't be shy; even if you're not sure how to answer a question here on the community, participate in the conversation. You'll build connections that might prove useful in your career.
