Geometry Creation and Editing

• Lens primitives (rectangular or circular apertures)
• Spline sweep and patch surfaces
• Polyline sweeps and extrusions
• Conic trough and revolved reflectors
• Cylinders, blocks, spheres, toroids, and skinned solids
• Union, intersection, subtraction boolean operations
• Object trim operation
• Move, rotate, scale, align
• Copy, rectangular, and circular pattern copy
• Multiple and partial immersion and cementing for solid objects
• Pickups for parametric modeling
• Grouping of model entities

Optical Properties

• Specular reflection/transmission/TIR with Fresnel losses
• Diffuse transmission/reflection
• Scatter models: mixed diffuse, narrow angle, and angle of incidence (AOI)
• Volume scattering (Mie, user defined)
• Scattering aim regions
• User-defined coatings
• Probabilistic ray splitting and importance sampling
• Constant or varying optical density or transmittance vs. length
• Index of refraction (constant, interpolated, standard dispersion formulas)
• Phosphor particle model
• Surface patterns of 2D or 3D elements
• Photorealistic rendering (Illumination Module needed for lit appearance)

User Interface and Other Features

• ActiveX interface for macro programming in MS Excel, VB, VC++, Matlab, Mathematica, and others
• OpenGL-rendered graphics
• Tabbed windows and editable spreadsheets
• Multiple design views and navigation windows
• Point-and-click, copy-and-paste, moving and resizing of windows
• Extensive help features

Point-and-Shoot Ray Tracing

• Parallel, diverging, or converging sets of rays
• Individual rays, 2D ray fans, 3D ray grids
• Sequential and non-sequential ray propagation

Libraries

• LED sources
• Display films
• Application and feature examples
• Utilities

Illumination Analysis

• Photometric or radiometric analysis using forward and backward raytracing
• Illuminance, luminance, luminous intensity
• Line charts, raster, contour, and surface charts
• Colorimetric analysis: 1931 and 1976 CIE coordinates, correlated color temperature
• RGB output display, CIE chromaticity chart
• Post-processing of output data
• Receiver data filtering using over a dozen filter types
• Encircled and ensquared energy
• Spectral power distribution
• Multi-CPU processing

Sources and Receivers

• Point sources
• Volume and surface emitters (spheres, cylinders, blocks, toroids)
• User-defined spatial, volume, and angular distributions
• Source emittance aim regions
• Spectral distributions: Blackbody, Gaussian, continuous, discrete, and user defined
• Angular and spatial importance sampling
• Ray data sources and Radiant Imaging source model support
• Surface and far field receivers
• Angular and spatial luminance meters
• Receiver aperture sub-sampling

Illumination Optimization

• Optimize illumination uniformity and/or flux on a receiver
• Match target illumination distributions
• Collimate and focus merit functions for non-sequential rays
• LaGrange constraint handling
• User-defined variables, constraints, and performance criteria
• Vary any floating point model parameter
• User-defined combinations of parameters
• Bounded and unbounded variables
• Backlight pattern optimization utility
• Parameter sensitivity utility
• Point-and-shoot ray merit functions

Translators

• SAT version 1.0 through 7.0
• STEP AP 203 and AP 214
• IGES version 5.3, including surfaces and solids
• CATIA V4 and V5 (import and export)
• Grouping and simplification of imported surfaces
• Geometry repair

• User-defined optical properties
• Phosphor materials
• Gradient Index (GRIN) materials
  
  

• Sequential ray tracing
• Paraxial solves
• Image path view
• Spot diagram and transverse aberration plots

• Links SolidWorks^® 3D mechanical models to LightTools, where you can assign optical properties and use the Optimization Module to optimize your design.
• Complete parametric interoperability between LightTools models and SolidWorks.