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Comment by mastax | Hacker News Reader

This is awesome! I spent a lot of time looking for a tool just like this and didn't find it. I've designed some simple-ish optical systems and I've been really frustrated by having trouble visualizing how different elements of the system will affect the light (especially moving parts). Also frustrating to have to calculate positions manually, etc. All the tools I could find were high-end quantum-optical simulators that cost more than my salary.

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So I'm quite uninformed on the topic, but why can't modern path tracing raytracers do this? They don't help with calculating positions, though, but might they still be suitable for checking the results?

You might be interested in reading https://benedikt-bitterli.me/tantalum/

It looks like it doesn't support mirrors or things like right angle prisms. Mostly targeting camera lenses, it seems. Not super useful to me at the moment. I'll be watching with interest.

Have you got any recommendations for open-source, or free, optics design software?

No, I never found anything satisfactory. I ended up using SOLIDWORKS with some 3D sketch lines and reflection constraints to approximate it.

I have done this myself, and I have a lot of experience in optics. I have also written a ray tracing program in Excel, which was able to reproduce aberration diagrams. By doing this first, I could use “professional” tools.

Solidworks is excellent for reflective optics, and for prismatic, mainly planar systems. You can simulate Snell’s law either with an equation, or a simple construction using line segments of unit length, and of length equal to the refractive index of the surrounding medium. If you have nothing else, but you understand optics, you might get by with Solidworks. And there are commercial optics addins that have been written using the SolidWorks API.

No. There just isn't. It's a shame there are so many wheels for artistic rendering ray tracing with amazing performance, but simply no one bothered to invert camera as sources and objects as detectors, add more geometry and a tiny bit more of physics, and make a opensource non-sequential ray tracing engine suitable for optics design.

Commercial tools like Zemax cost a leg (> $13k, and they were changing to subscriptions even before being bought by ANSYS) and have a rather steep learning curve. There are newcomers like COMSOL offering a ray tracing toolbox, haven't tried but they are offering generous free trials and the price seems to be more reasonable.

Edit: maybe the abadonware Beam4 mentioned by another post worth trying.

You can use some software for free with limitations eg OSLO

https://lambdares.com/oslo-edu-download

FRED also has a demo mode

https://photonengr.com/fred-software/demo-request/

That might be enough for simple designs.

Beam Four is also decent and allows you to use most common surface types including gratings.

I'm interested in Optica (for Mathematica) but I don't know anyone that's used it.

What sort of thing have you designed? I’m curious what the real world uses are for these sorts of tools.

It was a kind of laser scanning instrument, for my job. Measuring the intensity of reflected light. Don't want to get into it too much.

Stealthy answer

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