🎥 Creating a 3D design without 3D data

hi there and welcome back to OpenSolar in this short video, I'm going to show you how to do 3d designing so you get your automated pitch and shading calculations when there's no 3d imagery available so hop into this design zone of open solar the tab you see up on the top here and then go over to the top right we want to select manual design mode you can then choose your imagery provider and the one I'm going to be using here is Google sunroof imagery but you can also upload your own image whether it be from a drone or even a building plan of the site as well so once you've got your imagery click on select Drawing out the roof and now you'll see we have our image here and now we need to draw out the roof structure we can do that by starting at the top right and clicking on these advanced settings and then hit in this case, I'm going to choose a hip roof and you see you get the instructions pop up here to create a simple hip roof now what I want to do is just follow those instructions are nice and easily create the points that it's telling me to and you can see how it's automatically Drawing out the dormer built out that part of the roof for me nice and easy now the next step here would be building up the next section of the roof as you see here once again going to the top right clicking on advanced and then in this case I want to choose a dormer for this part of the roof so I'm going to click on hip dormer and then you get the instructions pop-up again so go to the first point draw out to the next point here and then finally the third point and you can see that has been drawn out for me like that now wonderful and finally, we just need to do one more of those before we've finished our roof design so another dormer hip once again following the instructions that it's giving me on the left perfect Adding obstructions great so we've built out our roof now that's awesome but we also want to account for any nearby obstructions to get all the shading calculations and things like that as well so I can see there are a few trees over here to the north part of the roof there don't seem to be any obstructions on the roof which is great you can add in those obstructions if there's a chimney or something by clicking once again at the top right click on obstruction and dropping it wherever you like on the roof here so for example if we said there's a chimney there we can drop it down right click on it and we can select a cube shape and then we can easily adjust the measurements like this you see Adding trees to build out a chimney if that's necessary I'm going to remove this guy from the moment and we're just going to focus on the trees over here for the time being so I'll go to the top right again and click on the tree and just plant one over here by the fence line I then want to right-click on that tree because I believe it's a palm tree in this case and I'll select palm tall as the tree type and then I can once again change the height of it easily over here like this Tree measurements so if you have the tree measurements that's obviously very handy in this case if you know when the image has been taken here you can use the shadows in the image to get an idea of when of how tall that tree would be based on the shadows and time the image is taken sometimes it's not always available and you might have to get the you know the measurements in real life or from the landowner whoever it might be um so in this case I'm going to say the tree is at these dimensions and there's a couple of them there so I'm just going to click on the duplicate button and that's just going to plant another one next to it and I'm going to duplicate one more so side by side like that and then once you've done that we can if we need to we can also click on the roof structure itself and we can edit the the slope of all of of all of the facets of the roof but you can also edit the slopes individually and input each of those different slopes on that roof so for right now, I'm going to assume they're 20 degrees and then as you normally would click on plus panels at the top to start drawing the panels along the roof and that's obviously picking up that the slope of 20 degrees and the azimuth as well now see that's hitting my setback there so I'm going to remove that panel perfect and we're going to hit another panel button up here and just drop a few more on this next roof going along perfect so we're at 6.2 kilowatts now and I'll just drop two more panels on this last roof over here Shading estimates and that'll do us so we've got a 6.9 kilowatt system there and of course once you've built out this 3d model like i said you'll get all of the shading estimates put in there as well so if you click on the panel group then click on this drop down here and let me just move myself across there we can see here now the shading losses from the nearby trees and that's mostly happening over here in the afternoon so I'll take this example this is, in may see we're at 100 sun access there as we move down now to 4 pm we're at 91 sun access and then at 36 percent sun access at 5 pm so you can see how those trees are interfering with this particular array and if you want to zoom in a little bit you can see those you know the shade right down to the substring in each individual panel there so you've got percentages on each panel as well as super detailed super accurate really leading class technology here that we're super proud of at OpenSolar so that's just a quick tutorial on how Final steps to build out these 3d models when there's no 3d imagery available The last step then would just be to create another view at the bottom here we can select a google top view in this case and we'll hit add then that will give us this top-down image which we can then align the panels to be on the roof like this until they're in the correct space then Hit align again and we can show this one to the customer as well so then just going through to the online proposal and you'll have that top-down image of the site ready to go and that's your proposal with all of the shading calculations configured and factored into it thanks for watching this video i hope it's been helpful feel free to ask us any questions anytime you like by reaching out to our support team have a great day you