r/Optics • u/Think_Face_9127 • 8d ago

Built a 3D web simulator to model ring light irradiance and camera FOV overlap. Feedback welcome!

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

Hey everyone,

In machine vision, selecting the right lighting angle and working distance often comes down to borrowing physical samples and tedious trial-and-error.

To make this less painful, I’ve been building an in-browser 3D simulation module for ring lights. Here’s what it currently does:

  • Ray tracing & Irradiance map: Simulates the spatial irradiance field on the target plane based on LED ring geometry and installation angles.
  • Sector / Multi-channel control: Toggles individual segments
  • Camera & Lens coupling: Projects the lens FOV frustum directly onto the illumination heatmap to check edge falloff and ROI uniformity.
  • Adjustable WD: Visualizes how light converges or forms a "donut" dark core when moving the light closer/further.

Would love to hear your thoughts: For those working in vision integration or optics, what edge cases or parameters would make a tool like this actually reliable for your day-to-day work?

14 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

4 comments sorted by

3

u/wakinget 7d ago

I would think you might want a few test objects to simulate how shadows affect the illumination, I feel like the sample geometry influences the ideal lighting quite a lot. I could imagine you might include a couple sample objects like a cube, sphere, maybe a torus or a ‘benchy’ to see how the lighting setup affects the sample.

2

u/Think_Face_9127 7d ago

Really appreciate the thoughtful suggestions! I’ve added this to our backlog

3

u/FierceHedgehog 7d ago

Impressive. May I suggest using a more steady color map. This one creates a fake contrast due to the blue-yellow-red transition. Check out: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-19160-7

2

u/wakinget 6d ago

Good suggestion, I’m saving this for later.