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The Zemax 22.2 release is here!

The 22.2 release is available now, and we’ve got a series of events and information designed to help you make the most of the latest and greatest. Highlights include…

  • Ray Aiming Wizard (OpticStudio) - Easily and accurately determine the optimal ray aiming settings to ensure that rays pass through your system.
  • Export to Speos Lens System (OpticStudio) - Create a reduced-order model of the current optical system to be used in a Speos simulation, enabling accurate optical sensor simulation in a realistic environment.
  • Performance Analysis (OpticStudio STAR Module) - Find out how temperature changes and deformations contribute to a change in system performance.
  • Ray Footprint Boundaries (OpticsBuilder) - Interactive ray footprint boundaries allow the use of CAD tools to measure, position, and analyze the effects that mechanical components have on the ray set.

Read the release notes linked below for full details: 

 


 

Learn from the experts in the 22.2 release webinar

Join the product managers for OpticStudio, STAR, and OpticsBuilder to learn more about all the new advancements in the 22.2 product major release. This thread will be used to collect questions before the webinar, and to answer any questions we received during the webinar. Feel free to post your questions! 

Be sure to subscribe to this thread if you want to see additional discussion regarding this topic. The thread will be open to comments through Thursday, June 23rd.

This event has concluded but can be viewed at this link.

Date: Thursday, June 16th

Time: 6:00am PST & 11:00am PST

Presenters:

  • Tom Pickering, Manager Product Management
  • Esteban Carbajal, Senior Product Manager
  • Lisa Clauson, Senior Product Manager

 


 

Our Community Manager’s Take

Our awesome senior engineer and community manager, @Allie, will tell you a bit about her favorite new feature.

Allie, what feature are you most excited about for the 22.2 release?

I worked on a feature called “Convert ZRD or ZBF to TSV” to replace the existing “Convert to MAT” functionality that is found in the “Convert file formats” menu.  The old functionality would take a ZBF or ZRD and turn it into a matrix inside Matlab, but it was missing some important data like wavelength for each ray segment. 

The new “Convert ZRD or ZBF to TSV” creates a tab-delimited text file that can be read into any post-processing software and contains a full data set for ZRD and ZBF files.

Have any customers you worked with in the past requested something like this?  

I have worked with users who wanted this type of data in Python and Excel, so they needed a more platform-agnostic solution. Beyond mathematical post-processing, this also allows users to export ZBF details including the complex electromagnetic field directly in a text format for import into other systems like Lumerical. 

I worked with a customer previously who needed to predict and mitigate stray energy in the form of X-rays. Their system was working outside the visible range and had potentially negative health effects on operators and neighboring labs. They were able to export their ZRD data to Matlab, where they identified rays that hit a particular object and then needed to evaluate the ray landing coordinates and intensity to determine risk.

Is there anything else you’d like to share? 

I think the ZRD capability is really cool because we’re seeing an increasing interest in stray light analysis across our customers. To perform the stray light analysis, you need detailed information about each ray’s path. 

I built this feature entirely with the API - no developers needed! The team is doing projects like this and sharing them in the Code Exchange section of the community, so be sure to check it out (to see the full solutions, you have to be logged in as a supported customer). We also have a KBA that describes how to make a user analysis with the API and bring it into OpticStudio as your very own custom button in the UI.

The webinar has concluded but the on-demand recording can be watched anytime at this link:

https://www.zemax.com/blogs/webinars/what-is-new-in-zemax-22-2-product-release


@Ronald.Taylor

Q: Does the export to Speos tool handle lens models that have multiple black box models?

A: Yes, the Export to Speos Lens System tool supports systems with multiple Black Boxes. If you do however run into any issues with this, please contact our support team.

 


Q: Hi, how the ray bunch is generated in case of randomn bunch and the same simulation (non-sequential, for ex. interferometric calc). What's the limit of ray number ? Thank you for replay

A: In non-sequential mode, if you choose “Sobol” for the source sampling method, you always get the same rays. But if you choose “Random”, it changes which rays are traced each time. You can see this if you set a source to “Random” and then update the layout plot over and over again - it chooses different rays every time.

The Maximum Source File Rays In Memory parameter in the System Explorer sets the maximum number of rays for each Source File object that will be held in memory. The recommended value is 1,000,000 rays; the minimum value is 5,000 rays.

If you set this number too high in a non-sequential file, OpticStudio will have to start writing the rays to disk and reading them out again, which causes everything to slow down significantly. This number however depends on how much RAM you've got.


@Andrey.Pravdivtsev 

 

Q: Are you going to add polychromatic spot diagrams as a criterion for performance analyze?

 

A: We will look into adding more performance criterions as customers provide feedback. Currently, you are able to set which wavelength and which field to monitor the various metrics individually. 


I’m looking at the page of updates:

https://community.zemax.com/opticstudio-release-notes-71

I’m confused - two separate listings seem to give a similar list of bug fixes. 

One is titled:  “Ansys Zemax OpticStudio 2022 R2.01 Release Notes” and the 2nd is  “Optic Studio 22.2.1 Release Notes”.  Are these the same thing?  Are they referring to differently licensed software?

thanks,

John


@BOWEN  You are correct that these two release notes are for separately licensed software options. The “Ansys Zemax” content is for software purchased with the new Ansys product packaging (available since July 2022), while the “OpticStudio 22.2.1” content is for those customers who have licenses for the Zemax packaged products. A majority of our users will have the Zemax packaged products. If you’re not sure, check your current software’s Help > About page.


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