Forbes Q Asphere Surface – New Feature

Now ASAP offers the ability to represent aspheric surfaces using an alternate representation developed by G.W. Forbes. The representation avoids the pitfalls encountered when defining aspheric surfaces using the even-ordered aspheric power series representations by defining the departure (or sag) series in terms of polynomials forming an orthonormal basis.

ASAP 25.02.01 supports definitions of both the Forbes Q^con (QCON) asphere for departure from a conic and Q^bfs (QBFS) asphere for a best fit departure from a sphere. Each representation accommodates the first six Q^con and Q^bfs polynomials which can produce up to a 14^th order asphere.

Expanded Thermal Irradiance Environment – New Feature

ASAP 25.02.01 includes enhancements to the recently introduced Thermal Irradiance environment. These enhancements provide access to more data and increased control for the user.

The environment now supports the following command and sub-command enhancements: GO, THERM, TABLE, SRC OBJECT, and UPDATE. Learn more about the expanded functionality within ASAP Thermal Irradiance, here.

TOWARDS DIR Command – Renovation

With the release of ASAP 25.02.01, users can now scatter rays into a cone of directions subtended by an arbitrary angle where axis of the cone is parallel to an arbitrary direction vector angled from +z axis.

This is accomplished by adding a DIR option to the TOWARDS command. Previously, it was only possible to scatter rays into a cone about an axis parallel to the global X, Y or Z axis; or parallel to the specular, surface normal, or retroreflection directions.

ASAP Help Facility – Renovation

This ASAP release builds on the ASAP Help Facility renovations introduced in ASAP 2025 V1. ASAP Help Facility now includes the new features introduced with this release.

Major Security Update – Infrastructure

In addition to new features, ASAP 25.02.01 includes a major security update to the ASAP License Runtime Environment (RTE) provided by Thales Sentinel LDK 10.x. The primary reason for the Sentinel update was to accommodate the forthcoming MS Windows 10 End-of-Life (EOL) occurring on October 14, 2025. The update addressed Windows 10 vulnerabilities and were resolved with the release of Windows 11. However, this update required all software vendors to update to Sentinel LDK version 10.

Related Videos: