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Shading objects
In this tutorial, we will cover the steps that need to be taken in order to set up your layout with 3D shading objects for the shading analysis.
Basic shading object creation
In the Shading objects window, you can customize each of the objects and add them to the drawing instantly. Currently, you can choose from five objects:
Tree
Station
Fence
Wind turbine
Electricity pylon
Object definition
The total height of the tree consists of the Top Diameter/Top height and the Trunk height:
Standard stations/buildings are measured as Lenght x Width x Height:
The fence is measured by the Height and Width:
🛈 The fence as a shading object is not transparent (wall) in AutoCAD and in PVsyst.
For wind turbines, Tower height, Tower width, and Blade length can be defined as:
The settings for the Electricity pylon are visualized below:
Manual placement
PVcase will automatically adapt objects to the terrain during manual placement:
🛈 TIP: You can use Spacebar to repeat a previous AutoCAD command instead of clicking Add objects in the interface.
Copy - Paste
PVcase will allow copying and pasting an existing 3D object, and it will automatically adapt objects to the new terrain location.
Copy - Paste + (Array)
PVcase will allow copying and pasting an existing 3D object using the Array function, which can be accessed through the console by clicking on Array when copying an object:
Array Path
An additional and optional way to place the 3D object(s) is by using the "Arraypath" function.
However, after using this function the trees will be considered as Array (Path) objects and PVcase will not be able to automatically adapt them to the terrain.
Solution - explode the Array (Path) object and then use Select similar to select all the objects and move them at least 0.0001 m. This will force them to adapt to the elevation of the terrain, like in the example below:
Fence placement
For the fence placement, it's required to have a closed are polygon already placed in the drawing. The closed area has to be drawn with a polyline. The fence will be automatically adapted to the terrain after manual adjustment:
Tree Batch Creation
It's possible to add batch placement of trees as shading objects, based on the topographical data. This option is available on the Shading objects menu:
To deploy this functionality, you may follow these steps:
Select the topography in the Layout generation settings.
Click on the batch create option in the Shading objects menu.
Select the one object in the drawing that corresponds to a tree.
The software will then ask to select the tree height, which can be previously defined as text objects.
The trees will be generated on the PVcase Tree Layer taking into account the height, and the diameter of the CAD object.
It's worth mentioning that if PVcase can't find a text height for the tree inside the round object that represents the tree itself, it will not design that particular tree. And the following message will be shown:
We recommend using a configuration similar to the following to avoid such errors:
If everything is done right, the final result should be as the one shown below:
Shading objects are then used for the shading analysis, which you can learn how to use by clicking below: