"Simon Dyer" <sim### [at] paradisenetnz> wrote:
> I'm trying to simulate a lens as a texture in plastic, similar to the effect
> of a lenticular or fresnel lens.

I don't think I've ever seen a fresnel lens done in POV. I did the basic
calculations for a 'spheric' fresnel a few years ago... they shouldn't be
too hard to find. I'll have to give it a go tomorrow.

> PovRay seemed to make sense to simulate the plastic, but oh what a learning
> curve.

Yes, but at least you have these forums to help ease that learning curve.

> Wondered if anyone could point me to a texture library or tutorial to help
> in this endeavour.

I only know the photons tutorial & example scene in the POV docs, but there
are a few people around who use POV for optical design work.

> The plan is to design the shape ( thin plastic about 2mm thick ) and add an
> underside repeating pattern texture that will let light arriving at the
> normal through from above but not light that hits at a tight angle.  Once
> I've simulated this in PovRay and proven it, the texture will be used in the
> CAD-CAM thats going to tooling for the injection moulding process.  Many of
> the engineering packages cannot do real ray tracing so they cannot simulate
> the lens effect and I'm stuck .

Sounds interesting.

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