CODE V’s Glass Expert provides essential features for optical designers

Glass choice is one of the central components of lens design. Yet lens design can be anything but straightforward. Further, lens material selection is a tedious task, and a human can only focus on it for so long before missing options. 

Built-in optical design tools like Glass Expert are now well known to be able to save time and energy during glass selection. They automate the process, and glass selection algorithms are able to find more lens material combinations than a human can.

Creating different lists for different elements in Glass Expert

CODE V’s Glass Expert allows you to automatically select optimal lens materials. It lets you create a single master list of glasses from any combination of available glass catalogs for your given set of parameters. Now, however, designers can work even smarter by defining multiple lists for different elements. 

Whether you are working on mobile phone cameras, self-driving cars, or aerospace applications, you may have different requirements for glass materials for different elements in your optical system. This once meant you would have to run Glass Expert multiple times. And running Glass Expert multiple times means that glass selection takes longer.

At least, that’s how it used to be. 

CODE V Optical Design Software’s Glass Expert with K2 Support

At K2realm, we love the power of Glass Expert. In an effort to better support the program, we met your requests to create a feature that will allow you to define multiple glass lists in a single Glass Expert run. 

We know that your lens designs can have added requirements due to environmental or fabrication concerns. K2 Extensions allows Glass Expert to incorporate these additional requirements in a single, efficient run. 

Our multiple glass lists feature is included in the new K2 extension bundle. Try it out now with our free trial offer. 

Features of our new Glass Expert toolkit

This K2 Extensions update offers the ability to:

• Specify different glass lists for one or more elements
• Use a subset of glass materials that are suitable for molding aspheres
• Use one list for elements that may be exposed to the environment, and another for elements protected within housing
• Use a separate list of glasses available in large pressings for larger elements

A Closer Look at K2realm’s multiple glass lists feature

Mitigate differences in environmental conditions

K2 Extensions can handle differences in environmental conditions. If, for instance, you have a system in which only the front lens is exposed to air, you’d have to either run Glass Expert a second time to create a glass list for that element or manually change the glass out. K2 Extensions automates this in a single run.

Work with differences in terms of fabrication requirements

Aspheres and moldability

Aspheres may go through a molding process for which the glass choices are limited. In this case, you may want the ability to specify a different list for elements that are aspheres. 

Large elements and availability

Meanwhile, some large elements require a larger pressing, and there are limited glasses available in larger pressings. You may want to create a separate list for any lenses requiring a large pressing. 

K2 Extensions lets you get specific and stay in control when it comes to fabrication requirements.

Other K2 support for global optimization: Our Glass Map and athermalization interface

We’ve been working with Glass Expert for years now. It’s an essential, powerful tool that optical designers use all the time to help with color/dispersion correction. Our goal is to streamline the user experience for lens designers as much as possible. Here are some of the other K2 Extensions features we offer:

The Glass Map for glass selection in optical system design

Glass Expert allows you to choose glasses from any catalog, in any combination. We have added a way for you to use a visual interface — an interactive glass map — to choose glasses. The glass map allows you to control selections by either clicking on the map or through the use of advanced filters. For many K2 Extensions users, this convenience makes Glass Expert use more streamlined.

Interface for the athermalization of optical systems 

Of all optical design software packages, we find that CODE V introduces the best capabilities. And to bring those capabilities to the user, we provide tools that streamline workflow and increase productivity. To this end, we are very proud of our athermalization interface, which works with the ENVPIK macro, a fantastic algorithm from the Optical Solutions Group. 

ENVPIK automatically simulates the thermal expansion of seated elements in machined housing. K2 Extensions packages ENVPIK’s numerous inputs into a clean, simple UI. It checks any needed glass data for you, which is crucial when optimizing with Glass Expert.

CODE V’s athermalizing feature has long been the most powerful one out there. In conjunction with ENVPIK and K2 Extensions, it’s now also the tool that’s easiest to use. 

Work smarter. Optimize better. 

We offer a free trial download of our optical design software because we think you are going to love our extension. Try K2 Extensions out today.