FRED Knowledge Base

Draw NURB Curve Control Points

This knowledge base article demonstrates a simple utility that can be used to draw a sphere at the position of each control point in a NURB curve.  This can be useful for visualization purposes when constructing geometry made from this curve type.  The designated NURB...

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Birefringent Material Temperature Modification

Currently, FRED does not support “global” temperature settings and evaluations of temperature sensitivity are generally undertaken using the scripting language.  This knowledge base article demonstrates a script which implements a change in refractive index with temperature for a birefringent material. The attached example file contains two...

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Surface Height Profiler

This knowledge base article describes a utility which calculates the surface sag for each pixel in a 2D grid placed over the entity’s outer trimming volume. Pixels outside of the trimming volume bounds are populated with “hole” values while pixels inside of the trimming volume...

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Wollaston Prism Polarizer

A Wollaston prism polarizer consists of two right angle prisms made of a uniaxial crystal such as calcite, which is commonly used for Wollaston prisms. The two pieces of uniaxial crystal are oriented such that the crystal axes are perpendicular to each other. Using the...

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Arizona Eye Model

Optical models of the human eye are used for designing ophthalmic devices and optical systems meant to be used with human eyes. This knowledge base article demonstrates one such model: the Arizona Eye Model, which is described in the SPIE “Field Guide to Visual and...

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Off-Axis Parabolic Mirrors

The current FRED catalogs do not contain off-axis parabolic mirrors for simple import into a document. This knowledge base article describes a utility that accepts parameters provided by the Edmund Optics catalog to automatically create the corresponding OAP as a closed geometry. During creation, the...

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Pickup Parameters

This knowledge base article discusses how to use FRED’s Pre-Update Script tool to implement pickup parameters, similar to what you might find in a sequential lens design code.  A pickup parameter is traditionally used to tie one surface parameter to another, setting RB = -RA,...

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#05 – FRED Technical Support Series

In v10.31 or later a new scripting command called SpectrumGetRandomWavelength was added which makes modeling wavelength conversion using a scripted surface or volume scatter model much simpler than in previous versions. This video demonstrates the new implementation in a simple fluorescence model. Please refer to the...

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Power vs Wavelength

In analyzing results from simulations involving polychromatic sources and dispersive elements, it may be of interest to examine the power reaching a detector as a function of wavelength. The script associated with this article can be used to generate such a data set after a...

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