Software for Lighting Design

Cross-sectional ray trace of a lithography lens, made with TracePro 2.0.4

A new version of TracePro opto-mechanical 3-D solid modeling software, customized specifically for the biomedical lighting and lighting design markets, has been released by Lambda Research Corporation, Littleton, MA. The new TracePro 2.0.4 includes bulk scattering for biomedical applications, updated luminaire design and analysis, a tracing tool for arbitrary bitmap images and a more powerful user interface.

New features for the medical equipment market include ray tracing volume scatter in human tissue and general bulk scatter through any volume. TracePro 2.0.4 provides enhanced support of standard illumination output formats for the Illumination Engineering Society and Eulumdat, and DXF output for irradiance and illuminance maps. The new user interface displays additional data on-screen for multiple or single wavelengths at the user's discretion. And the optional bitmap module wizard translates any standard BMP, JPEG, GIF, or PNG file into a TracePro source file that can be ray-traced through any geometry, and then displayed on any surface as an irradiance or illuminance output.

When used to develop prototypes for lighting products, TracePro cuts 30 to 50 percent off the time and cost of traditional prototyping methods. According to company sources, this is the only opto-mechanical 3-D solid modeling program with a CAD user interface, making it compatible with more than 200 CAD-based programs, including AutoCAD and Mechanical Desktop. TracePro 2.0.4 has an intuitive graphical interface that makes it an extremely user-friendly solid modeling software for stray light analysis, illumination analysis and lighting design. Step-by-step tutorials that help first-time users get quickly up to speed are available on the company's web site.

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For more information:

Circle 600 - Lambda Research Corp. or connect directly to their website via the Online Reader Service Program at http://www.1rs.com/004df-600