Calendar

SPIE Photonics West
February 2-7, 2013
Booth 2017
The Moscone Center
San Francisco, California
SPIE website

Strategies in Light
February 12-14, 2013
Booth 604
Santa Clara Convention Center
Santa Clara, California
SIL website

LIGHTFAIR
April 23-25, 2013
Booth 323
Las Vegas, Nevada
Visit event website

Introduction to Illumination Design Using LightTools
April 29-May 2, 2013
Pasadena, California
More details

COM Macro Programming in LightTools
May 3, 2013
Pasadena, California
More details

For a complete list of LightTools events worldwide: visit our website

LightTools 8.0 Available Now

We are pleased to announce that LightTools 8.0 is now available for download from the Synopsys SolvNet website: https://solvnet.synopsys.com/downloadcenter. Both 32- and 64-bit versions of LightTools 8.0 are available.

Updates Since LightTools 8.0 RC
Since the LightTools 8.0 Release Candidate (RC) was made available for download in November 2012, the LightTools team has implemented fixes to customer-reported bugs. We encourage you to download and install LightTools 8.0 for these bug fixes, as well as for the many useful enhancements delivered with this release.

Key Features in LightTools 8.0

LightTools 8.0 includes the following key new features.

Multi-CPU support enables forward simulation processes to take advantage of all CPUs or cores on a computer. This can dramatically improve the speed of simulations, as well as analyses and optimizations. The multi-CPU feature is built into LightTools, so it performs automatically whenever you run a forward simulation.

Customers who used LightTools 8.0 RC had the following comments about the multi-CPU feature:

"The multi-thread capabilities of LightTools 8.0 efficiently leverage my computer resources," said Dr. Juan Manuel Teijido, chief scientist at Haag-Streit AG. "The fast ray tracing allows me to perform rapid iterations and stay focused on my optical design. My productivity has been greatly improved with this release."

"The LightTools multi-CPU feature has yielded great results. On my latest project, simulation times with 1.5 million rays were reduced from 177 seconds to 41 seconds," said Kris Young, opto-mechanical engineer at Konstant Products. "This is more than a 4x speed improvement that enables me to run hundreds of simulations at the beginning of a project and also allows for much more complex optimizations at the end of the project."

New 3D objects are now available in LightTools, including revolved sheets and solids, extruded sheets and solids, and freeform sheets. These new objects expand the range of shapes you can create in LightTools for designing state-of-the-art lighting components.

• View the video: Creating freeform surfaces
• View the video: Using the LightTools swept primitive

Display of simulation results in the 3D Design view has been enhanced to provide more display options. For example, you can now display illuminance results for all dummy plane receivers in a model at once, or display results in true color as well as false color.

• View the video: Displaying simulation output in the 3D Design view

Improvements to parametric controls include the ability to save user notes and data in string and grid parameters, as well as new ways to move and group controls. These enhancements help you to more easily manage the parameters that control the geometry, position, and function of each component in a LightTools model.

• View the video: Saving user notes and data in string and grid parameters
  
• View the video: Grouping and organizing parametric controls

The Source Array Utility is new in this release. This utility allows you to convert a given surface of a solid to an array of sources whose parent source is a native LightTools source or a ray data source.

• View the video: Creating arrays of sources

The Street Lighting Utility has been enhanced with many new capabilities, including the addition of a Theoretical Intensity Distribution, in which you can define a distribution (illuminance or luminance) that is either Gaussian or uniform across the roadway. For details about all of the updates to the Street Lighting Utility, see Chapter 5 in the LightTools Utilities User’s Guide or watch the videos linked below.

• View the video: Street Lighting Utility: Basic Operation
  
• View the video: Street Lighting Utility: Optimization with an IES Source
  
• View the video: Street Lighting Utility: Theoretical Intensity Distribution Sources

For More Information

For more information on these and other enhancements in LightTools 8.0:

• Visit our Customer Support Portal to view all LightTools 8.0 new feature videos.
• Read the LightTools 8.0 Release Notes.

Known Issues in This Release

This section describes issues in this release that were discovered too late to fix before the release date. They will be fixed in the next LightTools service release.

• If you use a luminance meter in fixed aperture mode when the aperture position is not normal to the receiver (latitude ≠ 0), the luminance results will be incorrect. To work around this problem, you can tilt the receiver plane so that the luminance meter’s aperture is normal to the receiver plane, or you can select Scanning Aperture as the luminance meter’s Aperture Type in the Properties dialog box.
• If you run a lit simulation for photorealistic rendering, be sure to leave the Collect Receiver Data During Lit Simulation option turned on (checked), which is the default setting. Unchecking this option prevents LightTools from collecting the data needed for a lit rendering. The option is located on the Photoreal menu.