A method of rapid prototyping a lighting system which is at least one of folded path and multifaceted includes determining output power of the lighting system by calculating phase space density. A method of rapid prototyping a lighting system comprises ray tracing the lighting system, determining photometric quantities which describe the lighting system based on the ray tracing step, and providing a stereoscopic three-dimensional rendering of the lighting system based on the determining step. The three-dimensional renderings reveal any hidden pseudo-image artifacts in a lighting system before the lighting system is actually fabricated. A computer system for rapid prototyping a lighting system comprises a plurality of slave processors networked to a host processor. The slave processor and the master processor cooperate to ray trace the lighting system, and the slave processors perform homogeneous independent tasks. The computer architecture allows the homogeneous independent tasks to be distributed to the plurality of slave computers, so that the overall amount of time required to perform the tasks is drastically reduced. The amount of computational time required to generate useful information about a prototype lighting system is thereby reduced.