Affordable raytracing software under $1000

[fsonnichsen]

TL;DR

Seeking geometrical raytrace software

Unfortunately my Zemax license has expired a few years back and I have a nominal amount of geometrical optics tracing I want to look at. I don't want to burden our small grant with a new license and the work I am doing isn't very sophisticated.
Is anyone up to date on what is out there these days for raytracing. Preferably something under $1000. Doesn't look like a lot out there!

thanks
Fritz

 

[DBO]

Try Beam 6, it is shareware. If you have money you could buy OptiCad for about $2850

 

[DrunkenUFOPilot]

I used goptical for a simple project just a few years ago. It's not a big popular project, but I don't know of anything better. So many other things I found were just toys, or simple tools for first year physics exercises. Serious work could be done in Goptical.

Goptical is GNU free open source, with documentation and examples adequate at least for what I did. Goptical knows about the kinds of things optical engineers care about such as accurate glass models, Zernike polynomials to describe surfaces, analysis with ray fans, etc. It's unixy, takes system definitions in text files, and has a C++ API.

I don't know what fancy workflow and project management features Zemax has, but goptical won't have that kind of stuff. If you don't need that level of functionality, cool, Goptical will do fine for you.https://www.gnu.org/software/goptical/

https://savannah.gnu.org/projects/goptical