If you never worked with SPRAY before you should follow the first SPRAY tutorial (separate documentation) step by step. You will be guided through the most important sections of the program - as short as possible.

You should also inspect the discussion of SPRAY examples (separate documentation) in order to get an impression of what you can do with the program.

If you are an experienced SPRAY user, please read the section "What's new in version 2.4" about major SPRAY changes in 2008.

More detailed information is given in the following sections:

•Description of the SPRAY algorithm

•In most cases you will need optical constants for the materials used in your scenery

•SPRAY contains a very powerful technique to include light scattering media

•Materials and light scattering media are separated by interfaces

•Your scenery is composed of geometric objects which are usually covered by interfaces

•Objects called Cameras can be used to visualize your SPRAY scenery

•Having defined and positioned all required objects you can start the ray-tracing simulation

•Starting with SPRAY 2.0 you can work on a SPRAY simulation with the computational power of several PCs. See the section on Distributed computing for further information.

•If you have to perform many simulations you should automize your work with OLE automation.

•In order to optimize an optical system you can automatically adjust parameters of SPRAY objects. Be prepared, however, that the optimization will take a long time.

General information:

•SPRAY uses many lists - you can get information about working with list in the SCOUT technical manual. Your SPRAY package very likely contains a printed version of this document.

•Objects defining optical constants as well as detectors display spectra in 2D or 3D graphs. See the separate documentation 'A graphics course' to learn how to handle these.