MyntOptics Engineering Tools
Tools / Lens design

Sequential Ray Tracer

Exact (non-paraxial) ray tracing through spherical and conic refractive surfaces at infinite conjugates. Edit the prescription like a lens-design spreadsheet: get the system layout, transverse ray-fan plots, spot diagrams and first-order properties. Indices are evaluated at the trace wavelength from each glass's dispersion model.

i
New here? A lens is a list of surfaces. Each row is one glass surface: its radius (curvature, 0 = flat), conic (0 = sphere), thickness to the next surface, and the material after it. Hit a preset below to load a real lens, then watch the layout and spot diagram update. Switch to Advanced (top right) for distortion, vignetting and wavefront-error analysis.

Prescription (object at infinity)

#R (mm)
0 = ∞		Conic k Thick. (mm)Material →Semi-Ø

Trace settings

nm
mm
deg
mm
Fields traced: 0, 0.7× and 1.0× of max field. The entrance pupil is taken at the first surface vertex (no internal stop), and the image plane sits at the paraxial focus plus defocus.

First-order properties

Advanced analysis expert

Distortion and vignetting are evaluated at the maximum field; wavefront error is the OPD across the pupil referenced to a sphere on the image point (lower is better).

What this means

System layout

Transverse ray fans

Spot diagram (centroid-referenced)

Wavefront (OPD) fan expert

Optical path difference across the pupil in waves, referenced to the chief ray. A flat line is a perfect wavefront; curvature here is real aberration the spot diagram also shows.

Image quality summary

Reading the plots: the ray-fan plot shows how far each ray misses the ideal focus (a perfect lens is a flat line at zero). The spot diagram is where a grid of rays actually lands — if all the dots fit inside the dashed orange Airy circle, the lens is "diffraction-limited" and as sharp as physics allows at this f/#.
Learn: what the ray tracer computes

The tool fires real rays — not a paraxial approximation — through every surface, bending them with the exact vector form of Snell's law at each glass boundary. Where each ray lands tells you the image quality.

EFL / BFL / f/#: first-order properties from a paraxial trace. f/# = EFL ÷ aperture; smaller is "faster" (more light, shallower depth of field).

Spot RMS vs Airy radius: the Airy radius 1.22·λ·f/# is the diffraction floor. If the geometric spot is smaller than it, diffraction — not your lens geometry — sets the resolution.

Conic surfaces: setting the conic constant (e.g. k = −1, a parabola) on a strong surface removes spherical aberration — try it on the biconvex preset and watch the spot collapse.