Geometric Surface Types

There are various Surface Types which Surfaces can inherit. Surfaces have several inherent properties which will be described below.

Surface Type

Surfaces each have a "Surface Type" which is what the sag of the surface would look like. Such as a Conic Surface, Flat Surface, etc. One can read more about these surface types in the documentation tree or by clicking one of the links below.

Advanced Options

Additionally Surfaces contain some "Advanced Options", which allow users to functionalize that surface. Several options include: "Auto-Constrain Aperture", "Enable Fresnel Surface", "Enable Tool Model", "Enable Coatings", "Enable Diffractive Surface", "Enable Surface Scatter", "Enable Surface Displacement", "Enable Apodization" and "Mechanical Axis as Reference Normal".

Auto-Constrain Aperture

Auto-constrain aperture tries to maximize the mechanical aperture of an Optic's surface to the edge of the optic. If this is disabled, then you can specify up to what point you want the surface to go to before the surface is flat outside of this aperture.

Enable Fresnel Surface

Any surface can be turned into a Fresnel surface. There are several surface wrapping routines. First there is "Circular Wrapping" Routine which allows users to specify ring spacings, like in the example below. There is also a Max Sag Wrapping, which wraps the surface when the sag exceeds a certain value. Finally there is Linear Wrapping, which only does Fresnel surface wrapping in a single axis.

Enable Tool Model

This is intended to model Maximum manufacturing curvature of a tool. This finds regions where this curvature is violated and replaced with the limitations of tooling.

Enable Coatings

Currently the following coating types are accepted: "Uncoated", "Ideal AR", "Ideal Beam Split", and "Jones Matrix". A coating designer is currently in progress and if there is interest in this please let us know and we can get you access to being able to define "user-defined" material stacks. More information can be found in the Advanced Optics topics section about these surfaces in Muller Calculus & Transfer Matrix Method.

Enable Diffractive Surface

Diffractive Surfaces contain quite a few types in ODS: "Ruled Grating", "Echelle Grating", "Sinusoidal Holographic Grating", "Simple Grating", "Simple Kinoform", "Two Point Hologram" and "Variable Line Grating". Kinoforms in particular can be setup to apply sag to the parent surface, where the kinoform sag is added directly onto the surface sag. Additionally tooling marks are also accounted for in this when used in conjunction with "Enable Tool Model". In general, these diffractive surfaces allow you to functionalize the surface with some diffraction driven phenomena, which more information can be found in the Advanced Optics topics section about these diffractive optics.

Enable Surface Scatter

Surface Scatter contains a few different scatter models. First one must pick a ray sampling. This sampling tells ODS how many times to split a ray when coming into contact with this surface. By default it is set to 7. There are several models such as: "FRTS", "Harvey", "Kcorrelation", "BSDF" and "Lambertian" models where more information can be found in the Advanced Optics topics section about these surface scattering models.

Enable Surface Displacement

Surface Displacement is one of the most useful surface properties. This allows you to take a surface and displace it in X, Y, Z, θ, φ, and ψ, thus allowing for off-axis sections of otherwise symmetric surfaces. These all all performed in the local coordinate system of the surface and operate and are calculated in the same manner as how Elements define these in the global coordinate system.

Enable Apodization

The Apodization Types in ODS are: "No Apodization", "Gaussian Apodization", "Image Apodizer".

Mechanical Axis as Reference Normal

Mechanical Axis as Reference Normal is designed to take a surface that is tilted at the mechanical axis location, and "un-tilt"/compensate it so that the normal follows the mechanical Axis.