Merry Christmas to All Our Amazing Customers That Have Made 2025 Such a Fun Year!

A special thank you to the optical engineers in our user base who challenged me all year round. This year has been the busiest for optics at PADT by far. I have learned so much by researching the questions that our users have asked. If I have fielded a technical support case to you in 2025, thank you for your patience and trust in providing you with the top-notch support that PADT is known for.

A Year in Review

This year, I spent a lot of time with our Quantum Computing companies supporting their efforts with Zemax. This is not surprising as the realm of quantum computing has been skyrocketing, and it’s exciting to be a part of the progress—even if it is minuscule. 😊

Ansys Zemax cases take up almost 50% of the cases I closed in 2025— also not a shocker! Ansys Zemax is my bread and butter and one thing this year did teach me is that there is so much more to learn about the tool! Just when I think I have a good handle on a feature within the tool, a question came in with a perspective that I had not considered thus far. For this, I am grateful to have the Ansys Zemax team supporting me every step of the way through this Application Engineering journey.

I have written 6 blog posts this year, highlighting all the adventures I have had. From Tucson for Arizona Photonics Days and the very first PADT hosted Ansys Optics User Group Meeting to Albuquerque for a very special Ansys User Group Meeting hosted at the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History. Stray Light in Speos was a huge hit this year, and I spent a couple of months validating stray light results in Speos when using a Speos Black Box.

Santa Spotted—with Ansys Speos!

To end, I would like to show an appreciation for the new glTF import tool within Ansys Speos. Although photometric results cannot and should not be trusted with glTF imports, visualization of unique landscapes and characters is even easier now in Ansys Speos. In fact, I even caught Santa through Speos! 😊

Let’s turn some porch lights on…. 😉

3D Models Credits:

• Santa’s Sleigh by  UlissesVinicios (https://sketchfab.com/UlissesVinicios) Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0)
• Revised Exterior by OakBridge Development (https://sketchfab.com/oakbridge) Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0)