Efficient Ray Tracing Using LightTools

By Optical Research Associates

How long does it take to trace a million rays? The answer depends on the nature of the model and the speed and resources of your computer. Since you probably can't upgrade your computer every time your model becomes more complex, you will want LightTools to trace rays as efficiently as possible. You can easily control LightTools to balance the need for accuracy of the results with speed of the calculations. This paper provides an overview of LightTools settings that can save you a significant amount of simulation time.

The most important controls to significantly impact the ray trace speed are:

• Accelerated Ray Tracing
• Source Starting Point Classification
• Repairing Imported Geometry
• Probabilistic Ray Splitting