LucidShape CAA V5 based software from Synopsys accelerates automotive lighting design workflows

To keep up with fast-moving changes in automotive lighting, designers need new and improved ways to create design forms and speed time to market. The LucidShape CAA V5 Based product provides the only complete optical design, simulation, analysis, and visualization workflow within the CATIA V5 environment and is ideally suited to advancing automotive lighting innovations.

LucidShape CAA version 2021.06, now available, makes it easier than ever for designers to achieve their objectives. Upgrade to this release to reduce overall design time with improvements to performance, usability, and analysis capabilities, efficiently explore creative styling options, and deliver timely, accurate results to manufacturing teams.

“I’m excited to continue our investment in LucidShape capabilities for the headlight industry on the CATIA V5 platform,” said Stuart David, vice president of applications engineering in the Synopsys Optical Solutions Group. “The new release of LucidShape CAA includes many new design and analysis capabilities to help speed product development. Updates to the LucidShape CAA SmartStart Library expand the availability of ready-made optical measurements and textures to improve designer productivity.”

Consolidate and Automate Design Evaluations

LucidShape CAA introduces new Advanced Analysis capabilities to accomplish three key objectives:

Establish a framework that enables you to consolidate many individual analysis steps into a single analysis process. You can create, apply, save, and re-apply this process to evolving datasets throughout the design process, thereby automating repetitive analysis tasks.
Provide tools for a wide range of analyses encountered in automotive lighting designs so that you can handle most of these tasks directly in LucidShape CAA, thereby eliminating the need for external tools.
Simplify one-off type interactive analyses that are encountered during the optical design process when exploring or troubleshooting an optical design.

Create Accurate Source Models Quickly and Efficiently

LucidShape CAA now offers enhanced source modeling and positioning features to meet the demands of applications that require light sources with complex shapes or multiple sources that must be placed in different positions or patterns.

For sources with complex shapes, use the surface light source feature to create a light source by adding light emitting properties to any surface in CATIA. With just a few clicks, you define the source properties such as the emitter type and total flux.
For applications that require the usage of the same light source at many different positions in the model, try the axis system pattern feature. You can group multiple axis systems together and quickly duplicate light sources at each axis system in the axis system pattern.

Adjust Simulations for Best Performance While Maintaining Precision

You now have additional options to optimize optical simulation accuracy and speed in LucidShape CAA. When running a tessellated simulation, you can optionally specify the tessellation parameters for individual actors, which can be different from the global tessellation settings. This gives you flexibility to target selected actors for high-accuracy simulations, while optimizing overall simulation performance by keeping the remaining tessellation less dense.

Explore Creative Styling Characteristics

The MacroFocal reflector and lens design features have been enhanced to give you a new way to create unique style characteristics for signal lighting. The new grid of curves option enables you to define a base grid for the reflector or lens by specifying a set of user-created quasi-horizontal and quasi-vertical curves. Use the design flexibility provided by the grid of curves to make your brand stand out.

Improve Design and Modeling with Sensor Enhancements

The new light flow sensor in LucidShape CAA collects qualitative luminance data that is useful for visualizing your system’s lit appearance. Before starting an optical simulation using the Luminance Camera Sensor, you can adjust the viewing position and orientation to locate the ideal perspective for your analysis. In addition, the ray file sensor has been updated to support surface selections; this gives you the ability to specify a geometric interface for the recording of the ray file, which significantly alleviates the usage of user-created ray files.

Enhancements to Light Guides with Prism Extractors and New Laser-Etched Light Guides

The Light Guide Design Module helps automate the construction, analysis, and optimization of light guides and their extraction features. Enhancements in this release simplify the creation of custom light guide shapes; for example, sampled points from a user curve are projected into the reference plane and rotated according to the starting point and the direction that you specify. Furthermore, a new Surface mode light guide provides an alternative light-weight light guide construction, benefiting from significantly faster geometry construction.

In addition, an early version of the Texture mode light guide capability in this release allows you to model and optimize laser-etched light control structures. Laser-etched light guide textures are growing in popularity because they can produce high spatial uniformity levels. We encourage you to try the feature and provide us with your feedback.

Add Pre-Defined Materials and Media from the SmartStart Library

Instead of characterizing optical properties manually, save time by selecting pre-measured material and media properties from the LucidShape SmartStart Library. With this module, you have access to precise light scattering data for faster, physics-based system modeling.

The SmartStart Library has been expanded in this release with new measured BSDF materials from Luminit, Brightview Technologies, and other vendors, as well as mold textures metalized by Vergason Technology. Choose from these materials to precisely model diffusion or reflection effects on surfaces in your lighting system.

Support for CATIA V5 R30

LucidShape CAA version 2021.06 adds support for CATIA V5 R30 (without service packs).

Get Started Today

If you already use LucidShape CAA, download version 2021.06 from Synopsys SolvNetPlus or contact your local LucidShape distributor. If you’re interested in learning more about how LucidShape CAA can help you design better automotive lighting products faster, contact us to schedule a conversation and start a trial version.