RayViz is Lambda Research Corporation’s Add-In for Solidworks for visualizing light rays and ray paths. RayViz is fully integrated in Solidworks and allows Solidworks users to work in a familiar environment while giving them the added capability of assigning optical properties and raytracing directly in Solidworks.

RayViz gives Solidworks users the ability to apply optical properties from the TracePro property database directly in Solidworks. These properties are then saved as part of the Solidworks model. In addition to applying optical properties, users can define light sources and run raytraces in Solidworks to see the rays and ray paths. This can be very helpful in the early stages of product design for tasks such as beam path verification, checking for vignetting by mechanical structures, looking for light escaping from bends in light guides, and many other applications. RayViz includes catalogs of LED sources as well as sources with Gaussian and Lambertian beam widths of different values.

The biggest benefit of RayViz is that it allows the user to easily harness to power and capabilities of both Solidworks and TracePro. RayViz allows users to save the Solidworks model in a TracePro file format. This file can then be opened in TracePro for a full optical analysis. Since the optical properties and sources are defined in Solidworks and saved as part of the Solidworks file, the user just needs to open the file in TracePro and run the raytrace. If changes are made to the Solidworks model, there is an Update from RayViz option in TracePro that will update the model in TracePro.