In FRED, optical components are represented as they are built in the real world. For example Doublets, triplets, and beamsplitters are modeled in FRED using a Glue layer between adjacent optical components. The adjacent components are placed in close proximity, but not touching, and a glue layer is applied between the appropriate surfaces. Multiple surfaces in FRED should not be made precisely coincident because there might be an ambiguity on which surface is being intersected by a ray. This ambiguity may result in errors that halt the ray.
The mechanism for modeling glue between the surfaces is the Glue command, which allows the user to select the glue material and which surface to be glued to the surface being edited. More than one surface may be glued to the surface being edited and different glue materials maybe used between each surface pair.
When the a ray intersects a surface with glue FRED first checks to see if the ray, when propagated forward, will intersect with the glued surface(s). If it will intersect, then the ray is traced assuming the glue material is present. If it does not intersect a glued surface, then it propagates assuming there is no glue. See the topic Raytracing Glue Layers for further clarification.
This feature can be accessed in the following ways: •In a surface dialog, select the Glue tab •Right mouse click on a surface in the object tree and select "Glue" from the list menu
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