Update Luximprint Optical 3D Print Resin in Photopia
Most of us will recognize Photopia™ as a fast and accurate optical design program that produces comprehensive performance evaluations for non-imaging optical systems. The software is designed as such that its users don’t need an optics PhD to understand it. It includes a library of pre-defined lamps and materials with all their optical properties. Optical geometries can be generated based on design requirements with the special Parametric Optical Design Tools. Industry standards and customized output can be generated, all of it directly inside of Solidworks or Rhino. Its latest release, Photopia 2024.1 includes an upgrade of the latest Luximprint Optical Resins, available directly from the Materials Library.
Reliable Data – 30 years+ Experience
An important topic to consider when using any optical design tool is accuracy. As an optics designer, you need to trust that your design tool is accurately predicting the distribution of light within your model. Time and money is lost when software tools fail to produce accurate results. The team at LTI Optics understands this issue first-hand. The most crucial piece of the raytracing process is an accurate light source model and accurate material reaction properties. Without these, even the easiest to use, fastest raytracing engine still lives true to the “Garbage In, Garbage Out” mantra.
At LTI Optics, 30 years of experience in modeling and measuring light sources and materials for use in raytracing software backs the available data. Each of the over 1900 items in the Photopia Library have been created and verified by its engineers, with a level of precision and care that is unmatched in other source and material libraries.
Photopia Release 2024.1
In its most recent update 2024.1, spanning December 2023 to April 2024, an extensive update was implemented including several bug fixes, and several new lamps and materials in the Library. Photopia now also computes UGR at Spacing to Mounting Height Ratio of 0.25. This ratio is commonly used in Europe. As part of this work, we also performed an extensive comparison of UGR results from various software packages to show how the computations of these numbers is often inconsistent due to the UGR standard not fully defining all calculation input parameters.
Photopia for Rhino – TIR Collimator
Photopia 2024 included the final remaining features for the new PODT collimator tool which allows users to quickly create 4 styles of TIR collimators by just answering a few simple questions like diameter, depth, and material index. Then one can easily iterate on the collimator without having to join/trim any profiles or go into separate reflector and lens profile editing. What used to take 10 minutes to get set up now takes 15 seconds, and iterations are just as fast. We will report on this particular topic in more depth in one of our upcoming use cases with LTI Optics, one of our longest-serving optics design partners.
Use Photopia to design and analyize non-imaging and illumination optical systems directly in SOLIDWORKS and Rhinoceros. Image courtesy of LTI Optics
Luximprint Optical Resins
In the materials Library the Luximprint materials were updated, along with other lamps and light sources, most notably the Lumileds LUXEON. The enhanced LUX Standard and new LUX Crystalline material were optimized and added:
- Luximprint LUX Standard 3D printed optical material
- Luximprint LUX Crystalline 3D printed optical material
You can also read the announcement at the LTI Optics website and view further instructions. More information on the various Luximprint materials and capabilities, can be viewed at and downloaded from our Printoptical Capabilities section.
