Rhinoceros

This is the best tool out there for bridging the gap between optical analysis and mechanical CAD modeling. Non-sequential vector raytracing, radiometry, diffraction & coherence effects using the GBD algorithm. Unlike other optical CAD tools running on legacy code, this is a relatively new app with a good GUI. Very intuitive. Given how little of a market there is for optical engineering software, it must be a labor-of-love for the folks at PhotonEngineering.

FRED is a very powerful optical analysis program with an intuitive user interface. Fred combines excellent graphics with the right analysis tools and a flexible scripting language for customization.

FRED is not only extremely powerful, it's also user-friendly. It's the core development tool in our spectroscopy research group, and undergraduate researchers majoring in chemistry (with no formal optical engineering training) use it to design our instrumentation. The software has been described by its developers as an optical prototyping tool, and it does that extremely well. Basically, FRED brings CAD (not restricted to just the optical elements) and optical raytracing together in a single environment (its optical capabilities go much further than just raytracing!). The incredible ability to visualize our optics and all the necessary opto-mechanics to support them has been revolutionary in allowing us to rapidly try a variety of design approaches on-screen. We know if an assembly will fit in the space available before ordering a single component, how we will put it together, and we can assess its performance in ways that would be difficult to nearly impossible in the hardware itself. We use Rhino in conjunction with FRED for designing custom optical assembly 'blocks'--the STEP files are can be imported right in, but be careful, NURBS are not as fast in FRED as they are in Rhino.