raypier_optics VS SympleyWavey

Raypier - current front runner, I've managed to model both an RC telescope and a thorlabs microlens array here with results that seem quite reasonable. Also has a gui for sanity checking/interactivity. Unfortunately the performance really starts to tank as you increase the resolutions of the plane where the E-field is evaluated, increase number of rays or increase number of surfaces. (Something I would like to do to be able to model atmospheric disturbance + mirror misalignments +

Tracing meshes is something I've just started tackling in raypier (https://github.com/bryancole/raypier_optics). This is a spatial-search problem and a Oriented Bounding Box tree structure (OBB-tree) is a decent approach. Once you can trace a mesh, this provides the starting points for tracing freeform surfaces like NURBS. The approach is to split a NURBS surface into a set of B-spline patches. Each patch is defines by a coarse mesh of control points and discretised into a finer mesh which we trace with a OBB-tree to get close to the correct intersection. Then employ Newton-Raphson to get the final intersection. Once we can trace NURBS / Spline surfaces, we can then generalize the code to handle anything a CAD model can contain: the ultimate prize!

I'm developing a physical optics modelling package for python, based on the Gaussian Beam Decomposition method (a.k.a. method of Gausslets). It also does conventional geometric ray-tracing. It handles polarisation, dispersion and diffraction. Raypier provides nice model visualisations via VTK and a live GUI where you can "twiddle" with your model parameters. Performance is pretty good, I think, although I've got no points of comparison. Check out the docs at https://raypier-optics.readthedocs.io/en/latest/introduction.html and/or get the code at https://github.com/bryancole/raypier_optics

Code used to make this is here, relying on prysm for optical stuff + standard numerical python packages. https://github.com/AlistairSymonds/SympleyWavey/blob/main/simulations/zernike_derivatives_sanity_check.py

Out of these I've downloaded Raypier, Aether and Quadoa trial. Even then I've only gotten stuck into Raypier, code used to generate those above scenes is here if anyone is curious: https://github.com/AlistairSymonds/SympleyWavey/tree/main/simulations. If the performance didn't slow so much I'd just crank the rays counts and be happy with that, my inclination is to figure out prysm now too but was wondering if there's anything else obvious I've missed out there? Or am I approaching this all entirely incorrectly! Any and all comments on my rambling welcome :)