Let’s face it: bold graphics and visually appealing diagrams will catch the attention of your audience, they are impressive, and have a tendency to leave a mark of professionalism. 

Since quality graphics can have a large impact on the professional appearance of a presentation and/or report, ZEMAX supports various graphical functions which make it easy to completely transform your diagrams.

As an example, the 2D Layout in ZEMAX is very useful to the professional engineer, but really doesn’t do much for drawing the attention of a general audience:



We can improve the presentational quality of the drawing by simply choosing a default Shaded Model in ZEMAX:



Or, by changing color combinations, adding some rotation, altering opacity levels, and drawing a ¾ slice of each element, we can easily produce something like this:



And lastly, we can use the power of other software to create a movie from multiple screen captures:



This article is designed to provide a detailed discussion on the various techniques and tools available for exporting and creating graphics in ZEMAX.  We will cover how to copy/export graphics, annotate them, change opacity levels and colors for surfaces, and develop animations quickly and easily.