Photopia^™ 2020 Release

3D Illuminance Planes

Now in Photopia for Solidworks illuminance planes are no longer limited to planar rectangles. You can create illuminance planes on any surface, allowing you greater flexibility in assessing your optical design.

To assign a 3D surface as an illuminance recorder, first select the surface and then choose "Add Illuminance Plane / Add Recording Plane" from the Photopia Command Manager inside of Solidworks. By default, all recording objects and illuminance planes are scaled such that their magnitudes are relative to each other. You can adjust the scale in the Tools > Photopia > General Settings.

Traditional illuminance planes are still the best option when you need to get illuminance values and statistics over your surface. To define an illuminance plane, you'll use the same method as before, first setting up a rectangular plane, then clicking "Add Illuminance Plane / Add Recording Plane" with nothing selected, and then selecting the rectangular plane. You can then adjust grid settings and other options.

All Changes from 2019 to 2020