Intersecting objects make very poor optics.

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Intersecting objects make very poor optics.

Postby Videogamer555 » Mon Jan 12, 2015 5:10 pm

I tried intersecting a circle (to simulate a spherical lens) and a rectangle to get a barrel lens. This should be the same as a spherical lens except with the extra glass around the cylindrical section removed. Light shining through a spherical lens or equivalent barrel lens should behave exactly the same. But it doesn't in this software. That's when I realized that what was happening was that during intersection it was converting the perfect circle into a spline (series of line segments that approximates a smooth curve). Unfortunately the resolution used in this program's spline conversion is too low for optics (maybe fine for mechanics, but for optics you'll need probably to use 100 times as many line segments as is currently used for the spline approximation of a given length of a curved surface, in order to avoid noticeable ruination of the optics simulation).
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Re: Intersecting objects make very poor optics.

Postby Kilinich » Tue Jan 13, 2015 11:32 am

That's true. Optics in Algodoo is only for basic demonstration.
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