Optical design software for light pipes.

Light Pipe and Light Guide Optical Design Software

Photopia optical design software is well suited to designing, analyzing and optimizing light guides and light pipes, commonly used for illumination, backlighting, indicators and consumer devices.

Photopia's direct integration into SOLIDWORKS makes it simple to create light pipe geometry as part of your mechanical model and test its optical performance.

The source and material library is filled with over 2895 items, so you'll find a complete full-color model of the LED you're using along with material properties measured with care in our in-house lab. No more guessing or needing to create your own source and material models, we've done the hard work for you.

✔ LED indicator light pipes

✔ Display backlight light guides

✔ Automotive forward and tail lighting

✔ Consumer electronics

Visual Output

In Photopia you can view the light interacting with any 3D surface, allowing you to see what a light pipe will look like. This allows you to optimize your light pipe surface texture, material particle density and geometry to improve uniformity and extraction.

The images to the left show light pipe with a blue LED as either a clear or scattering material and how that improves the extraction of light along the entire circumference of the ring.

Surface Texture

Light guides commonly use a surface texture to extract light in specific regions. These textures are often small and complex, which can be difficult and time consuming to raytrace. Photopia comes with a virtual Material Lab, which allows you to generate full BRDF/BTDF/BSDF data for any material geometry you can draw or scan from a physical part.

  SPIE Lamp Modeling Paper

Dot Patterns

Some light guides use a pattern of dots (paint or laser etched) or molded in features that vary along the length of the light guide. Photopia can be used to simulate these systems, and also optimize the pattern density variation using a pre-built script in Grasshopper for Rhino.

  Light Guide Tutorial - Constant Spacing

  Light Guide Tutorial - Variable Spacing & Geometry

Particle Scattering

Light pipes will often use a low density of scattering particles to mix and uniformly extract light over the emission region. These particles could be other plastic or glass beads, color pigments, or even energy converting phosphor particles.

Photopia's raytracer allows for full control over these types of reactions, giving you control over the following properties:

✔ Base Material Index and Attenuation

✔ Scattering Particle Density

✔ Scatter Distribution from Particle

✔ Spectral Transformation at Particle

✔ Particle Absorption

Demo

The first step to evaluating if Photopia is a good fit for your company is to schedule an online demonstration where one of our expert optical engineers will discuss your projects and give you a walkthrough of the software.

Schedule an online demo  

Trial Version

After the online demo, we're happy to provide a 2 week trial license so that you can use the software on your own projects or show it to others in your office.

Start a Trial

Purchase

We sell direct and through a network of international representatives.

In order to provide a quote please contact us and we'll either provide one or put you in contact with the correct representative.

Request a Quote