Introduction

Authored by Don Dickinson

In Zemax legacy releases, STAR was issued as a separate license to enable the STAR module within Opticstudio Professional or Premium. With Ansys licenses, STAR is now part of an OpticStudio Enterprise license and legacy STAR licenses are no longer available.

This article goes over the basics of STAR with Zemax legacy licenses.

General requirements for end users to use STAR

• Access to an OpticStudio Pro or Premium subscription license; STAR does not work with perpetual licenses.
• OpticStudio 21.2 or higher

Single User licenses

These licenses were the primary ones available. They can be activated on any user's machine to add the functionality of STAR to Opticstudio. These licenses can be freely transferred to other user's computers if somebody else needs to use the license. 

Network licenses

These licenses can be activated on a server at your organization and will be available to anybody on your network with OpticStudio installed. First, you have configure your machine to find the license server.

Then open Zemax License Manager and select the "View License" section. Select "All Products" or "Star Module" from the "Product" dropdown box. Click "Enable" next to the STAR license. Once enabled it will use STAR whenever you start Opticstudio.

Enabled STAR license:

Releasing STAR Network licenses for other users

With network licenses, you can release the STAR license to make it available to others. Please do so once you no longer need STAR. This is not needed for single-user licenses since they only available on your machine.

To do so, first close Opticstudio if it is open. Open Zemax License Manager from the Start Menu. Select the "View License" section. Select "All Products" or "Star Module" from the "Product" dropdown box. Click Enable to clear the highlight on it. The next time you start Opticstudio the STAR tab will be greyed out 

Released STAR license: