Photon Engineering - FRED

Visualization

Twenty years ago, optical engineers were content to produce line drawings showing the profiles of the lens systems and the trajectories of a few select rays.

Today, optical engineers have to communicate complex concepts to not only technical personnel, but also to investors and sales and marketing personnel. Consequently the demands for better visualization from software have never been greater.

FRED was designed from the ground up to provide superb visualization of optomechanical systems. All aspects of component visualization are under the complete control of the user: diffuse, ambient, and specular colors, degrees of shininess and opacity, and level of surface tessellation. With little effort the user can create photorealistic representations of their systems; photorealistic representations have been shown repeatedly to add credibility and clearer understanding to client briefings during product development.

Additionally FRED can incorporate the results of irradiance, intensity, and color image calculations directly into the rendered view.

With the release of FRED 8.50, FRED now offers users cutaway views and anamorphic scaling plus the capability to visualize raytrace paths directly from the built-in stray light report.


3 color detector		Incident flux visualized on geometry

Red, green, & blue LEDs illuminating a diffuser		Shack cube interferometer

Cutway view of a Shack-Hartmann device as modeled into FRED