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LucidShape Release Helps Automotive Lighting Designers

Optical 91³Ô¹ÏÍø Editorial Team

Mar 21, 2022 / 3 min read

LucidShape Version 2022.03 Introduces Advanced Analysis and MacroFocal Enhancements to Simplify Product Development Workflows

The latest release of LucidShape, version 2022.03, provides many new features and enhancements to help designers speed into the future of automotive lighting. Designers can work smarter and faster with the new Advanced Analysis Tool, and develop cutting-edge lighting with MacroFocal enhancements for freeform lenses and reflectors. Additional updates included in this release help simplify product development workflows to accelerate time to market.


Advanced Analysis Tool

The LucidShape Advanced Analysis tool streamlines analysis steps, provides access to a wide range of new analysis tools, and simplifies interactive design analysis and troubleshooting. With Advanced Analysis, you can:

  • Interactively analyze a light distribution to see if your system meets requirements by performing measurements on points, splines, and polygons.
  • Analyze multiple lamps at one time by combining multiple UV Data files and taking measurements on the results. For example, you can iteratively manipulate the individual or grouped UV Data files to produce an artificial ideal sum light distribution.
  • Save measurement sets to reuse on different UV Data files, for example UV Data files resulting from multiple design iterations.
  • Export measurements to a table for later review.
Advanced Analysis Tool in LucidShape | Synopsys

MacroFocal Enhancements

LucidShape¡¯s MacroFocal feature for the design of multifaceted reflectors includes state-of-the-art freeform design capabilities to provide more granular control over light spread to maximize flux collection. This gives designers the freedom to focus on styling and appearance, rather than the implementation details of complex optical components. Enhancements to the MacroFocal feature simplify design workflows further, including the ability to:

  • Use the Freeform Design feature with multi-faceted lamps
  • Easily navigate through light intensity data (LID) by facet
MacroFocal Enhancements in LucidShape | Synopsys

Import/Export Improvements

Improvements to LucidShape import and export capabilities let you work more efficiently with other CAD software tools. For example:

  • When exporting all or part of a model to CAD software, it may be useful to separate individual shapes, such as those describing a specific lamp function. You can now export selected shapes to separate files directly.
  • You can export Mesh Surface geometry to CAD software as STL files.
  • A new option allows you to open multiple files into the same model. This enables you to import multiple objects, such as housing shapes, into your model more efficiently in a single step.

Automatic Vertical Aiming

Important light distributions commonly used for exterior automotive lighting applications exhibit a cutline shape to avoid glaring other motorists. When physically testing such lamps for regulation compliance, an aiming procedure must be carried out prior to conducting the photometry test. In most cases a vertical aim adjustment is required to satisfy aiming requirements as stated by the regulations.

When photometrically testing simulation results generated with LucidShape, you can now select an automatic vertical aiming option. You specify the horizontal position and desired vertical cutline position and the aim adjustment is carried out for you, automatically. This can save a lot of time during virtual prototyping and testing.

Lux Sensor Updates

The quantitative evaluation of lux sensors can be challenging, particularly when evaluating lux sensors defined on many faces, or when a lux sensor is assigned to a mesh surface.

To expand measurement options and simplify evaluations, LucidShape now includes the project lux sensor light feature. With this feature, you can easily create a UV Data View by specifying the desired view plane orientation and extent. To further simplify the usage, we have added get and set methods to automatically set up the view plane based on the GeoView camera settings. If you prefer to preview the view plane settings prior to creating the UV Data View, you can also use the set method to adjust the GeoView to correspond to the current view plane settings. You can then deploy the new Advanced Analysis tool to effortlessly perform a multitude of point, curve, slice, and zone measurements.

Lux Sensor Updates in LucidShape | Synopsys

Availability

LucidShape v2022.03 is available now. Customers with a current maintenance agreement can download this version from the Synopsys website using their account, or obtain the software from their local distributor.

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