Launching an Optical Design and Engineering Workflow with Autodesk VRED

During product development, a design studio’s vision won’t always conform to the realities and constraints that confront engineering teams. For example, its vision could involve incorporating a uniform light source to illuminate an entire panel. However, the optics of the lighting source and system may result in only a portion of the panel being illuminated.

The disconnect between concept and reality could potentially extend into a costly and time-consuming iterative process, where the design and engineering teams repeatably bounce between ideas until they land on something that is both safe and aesthetically pleasing.

To empower the decision-making abilities of these teams and to protect the design vision, Ansys and Autodesk created a joint workflow for automotive companies. It combines 3D visualization and virtual prototyping software with physics-based lighting simulation solutions. 

Traditionally, the design team passes their models to engineers who then pass back their simulation results. Not only is this time consuming, it can also introduce data inconsistencies when importing data between different software tools.

Ansys and Autodesk aim to address this challenge by combining Autodesk VRED Professional with the physics-based light simulation capabilities of VRXPERIENCE Light Simulation. This workflow will help ensure data consistency and place physics-based lighting simulations in the design team toolbox.

The workflow is also able to detect defects in a design that can’t be discovered without optical simulations. For instance, the design team will be able to identify dark spots and light leakage without sending their models to an engineering team. This will expediate the development cycle as designs can be optimized with the help of on-demand simulations.

By enabling the design studio to run a considerable amount of simulations themselves, the engineering team will free up its time as it will only be required to verify the final design, in Autodesk VRED. This will enable the team to focus on other development issues.

Through the Autodesk VRED Professional and VRXPERIENCE Light Simulation workflow, design teams are able to:

• Mesh Autodesk VRED designs and import them into VRXPERIENCE Light Simulation
• Import engineering data, optical components from Ansys Speos and other optical software
• Add optical properties, material properties and lighting sources using the Ansys Optical Library
• Run high-performance computing (HPC) compatible Speos-based ray file simulations
• Generate ray files
• Import ray files into Autodesk VRED to generate raytraced photorealistic renderings

To learn how to combine Ansys VRXPERIENCE and Autodesk VRED Professional workflows, watch the webinar: Deliver Engineering Grade Light Simulation to Studio Designers or the video below.