How to Show Rays in SolidWorks
Radiant Zemax would like to thank Dave Mansur from OPTRA, Inc. for providing us with the Solidworks™ details in this article.
It is often useful to export rays along with the optical components of your design to be viewed in a 3D CAD program. When exporting a sequential system, the number of rays to export, as well as the ray pattern is defined directly in the export window:
When exporting non-sequential designs, the ray pattern and number of rays are defined by the sources and their number of layout rays. Note that the STL format does not support the exporting of ray entities.
Although Zemax creates the ray information in the exported file, Solidworks™ doesn’t read this information in by default. In Solidworks, the user must change a specific import option in order to read in the ray information from the file to be imported.
When opening a file in Solidworks, choose the “Options” button:
From within the Options window, check “Free point/curve entities” and select the “Import as sketch(es)” option:
That's it! You will now see the rays inside your SolidWorks model.
If you know any secret settings in any other CAD packages that improves the interoperability with Zemax, please share this information with us by sending an email to
support@Zemax.com. We will then add the information that you provide to the Knowledge Base to share with the rest of Zemax users!
How to Show Rays in Autodesk Inventor
Radiant Zemax would like to thank George Eck from Universal Instuments Corp. for providing us with the Autodesk Inventor details in this article.
In order to show rays on a STEP file in Autodesk Inventor 2014, open Autodesk Inventor and click the "Options" box on the open screen. Simply check the "Wires" box in the "Entity Types to Import" section, as shown below. This technique also works for Autodesk 2013, and possible older versions as well.
发表于 2014-4-8 16:41