optical simulation software

[lilmantis]

Hello all, can anyone suggest a software to perform optical simulations for LEDs, reflectors and lenses?

[lilmantis]

Any ideas?

[awallin]

zemax is use a lot, but commercial and probably $$

a good open source alternative to zemax would be nice!

[Doctorandus_P]

The Sketcher in FreeCAD has the ability to daw lines accordint to the refraction law (Shell's Law).
FreeCAD is a mechanical cad package though, and this functionality is probably not very advanced.

I would also not be surprised if animation packages such as Blender were able to simulate lenses in the raytracing part.

This gives some interesting results to the capabilities of Blender:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=blender+lens+simulation

It also points to a separate project called "luxrender", which sounds like it might be interesting to you. Blender / Luxrender seems perfectly capable of this, but Blender is a multy headed monster and a bitch to tame / learn. You probably only need a very smal portion of it though...

[rstofer]

I have no idea what you're trying to simulate but, at a guess, if it involves numbers, MATLAB can do it.

https://www.mathworks.com/products/connections/product_detail/beamlab.html

I did try to Google for 'optical simulation FORTRAN' and got some hits.  As FORTRAN is my favorite numeric computing language, I would tend to see if I could come up with enough functions to do the job.  In general, FORTRAN lacks the ability to plot stuff without going to some offline process like GNUPLOT.

I'm of the belief that there is nothing new in the world.  Whatever I want to do, somebody has already done it and if I can just come up with the proper search terms, Google can find it.

[lilmantis]

Thanks everyone. It does appear that Zemax is the most popular choice for lens design.