Design software features photorealistic visualisation module

LucidShape's Visualize Module delivers high-speed photorealistic images of an automotive lighting system's lit appearance, which demonstrate luminance effects when light sources in a model are illuminated. Because the Visualize Module depicts all interactions between system geometry and light sources, it provides designers with a physically correct diagnostic tool for evaluating how a lighting system will be perceived by the human eye. This is particularly important for evaluating automotive components such as turn signals and brake lights. The Visualize Module is a fast, reliable engineering tool that enables designers to perform design checks and make improvements early and often in the product development process.

The Visualize Module supports environment sources for the integration of 360° HDR photographic environments into photorealistic visualisations. This includes all physical and optical properties for an immersive, accurate rendering of a lighting scene. The module also combines LucidShape's luminance camera and backward ray tracing to perform rapid, high-accuracy luminance calculations and generate photorealistic images at multiple angles and viewing directions. In addition, the visualisation module harnesses LucidShape's GPUtrace solution, which uses GPU computing to accelerate illumination simulations by orders of magnitude compared to multithreading capabilities. The speed of the Visualize Module's simulations gives designers the flexibility to rapidly evaluate their models at any point in the design process.

The Ray Data Viewer now provided with LucidShape creates illuminance images based on ray data sources. This allows designers to quickly preview the lit appearance and structure of vendor light sources before incorporating them into their models. Sources can be viewed from various angles using a camera positioning capability.

The Light Pipe Tool simplifies and speeds the creation of complete light pipe designs by allowing prism bands, which model sheets of prismatic microstructures, to be created in conjunction with light pipe surfaces in LucidShape. With this tool, the light pipe surface is automatically fit to the prism band and merged into a single new shape, producing a seamless, optically accurate light guide.

LucidShape's material library, which provides a wide array of surface material and bulk volume media, has been expanded to include measured BSDF models from Synopsys' LightTools illumination design software. The measured BSDF data delivers unsurpassed accuracy for modelling surface scattering for materials commonly used in automotive lighting and can be expanded and customised by designers according to their unique requirements.

"The LucidShape Light Pipe Tool significantly reduces development time for MENTOR's major optics products," said Dr. Michael Olbrich, Head of the Lighting Engineering Group, MENTOR, Prazisions-Bauteile. "In addition, the LucidShape Visualize Module allows us to create physically correct photorealistic images for presenting MENTOR design concepts to our customers. This is a tremendously effective tool for communications with design teams and decision-makers."

"The Visualize Module is an indispensable part of our automotive lighting design process," commented Richard Pacholski, Lighting Designer, Samvardhana Motherson Reflectec. "Our customers focus not only on optical performance, but also increasingly on the visual appearance of the illuminated product. With the Visualize Module, we can quickly and accurately simulate an illuminated product in a studio or outdoor environment and at various viewing angles, which is key because product appearance and illumination levels can change drastically at different viewpoints."

"The LucidShape Visualize Module is a powerful engineering tool that doesn't just render a design, it provides a virtual prototype that allows automotive lighting designers to quickly pinpoint aspects of a model that can be improved to generate the best possible performance," said George Bayz, Vice President and General Manager, Optical Solutions Group, Synopsys. "The module reduces the need for costly and lengthy physical prototyping."

LucidShape version 2.0 is available now. Customers with a current maintenance agreement can download this version from the Synopsys website using their SolvNet account.