Illumination design software features automotive modeling and analysis

LightTools' multi-threading capabilities enable illumination simulations to take advantage of all CPUs or cores on a computer. By supporting backward simulations and photorealistic renderings, version 8.1 offers significant improvements to the speed and efficiency of these processes. This is particularly relevant for for visually evaluating and communicating illumination designs. It allows designers to perform a region analysis to examine illuminance and intensity results in a specific area of interest in their 3D models. Useful for identifying undesirable hot spots in illumination systems, this provides a quick and easy way to analyze rays that contribute to a particular region of interest in the model.

Flexibility for designing state-of-the-art lighting components has been increased with freeform solids and objects that can be swept along a path. They simplify the creation of faceted reflector structures and the modeling of complex, 3-dimensional lightpipes and lens-like solid objects that can be optimized using the LightTools Optimization Module. The Ray Report utility allows users to visualize ray data in easy-to-read, customisable formats, while the Plot utility allows users to plot multiple raster charts and line charts side by side. This Plot utility also provides data analysis features including mesh apertures and data-differencing for receiver mesh data, user grids, IES files and user data files.

Version 8.1 includes an Automotive Test Point Analysis Utility which enables designers to test intensity distributions against industry specifications and user-defined specifications. It has been enhanced to include many specifications from the Inland Transport Division of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe. In this updated version, the LightTools Street Lighting Utility has also been enhanced to provide a plot for visualizing the roadway from the driver's perspective. This utility can make independent plots for the illuminance or intensity of a single luminaire at a roadway surface, and now also supports files in Eulumdat format.

For biomedical optics, LightTools features enhanced capabilities for modeling light interactions with scattering materials. These two new volume scattering types, Henyey-Greenstein and Gegenbauer, are particularly useful for modeling the scattering properties of tissues.

LightTools models facilitate the design and analysis of lighting systems with small-feature, diffractive optical structures such as nano-structured LEDs: they support Bidirectional Scattering Distribution Function files generated by Synopsys' RSoft Photonic Component Design Suite that contain scattering information for periodic optical structures, such as subwavelength diffractive surface gratings.

Thomas Hough, President, Whiterock Design, commented: "LightTools' multi-threaded processing is a game changer. Simulations that used to take 10 minutes to run are now finished in less than two minutes. I am interacting directly with LightTools, tracing rays and changing things on the fly. I spend a lot less time waiting for results, which keeps the creative process moving forward in an organic manner."

"LightTools provides the tools that allow us to design, analyze and optimize optical designs quickly and accurately. The new release 8.1 enhances these features by introducing multi-threading capabilities for backward illumination simulations," comments Massimo Gattari, Innovation Lab Director at iGuzzini illuminazione.

LightTools version 8.1 is available now. Customers with a current maintenance agreement can download this version from the Synopsys website using their SolvNet account.