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Playground · Renewables

Solar Roof Designer & Optimiser

Model the building, not just a panel grid. Pick a roof form and pin the location: the engine fits panels to every usable roof facet, mounts them on rails, ray-casts overshadowing from chimneys, trees and neighbouring buildings (shaded modules turn violet), and draws the sun's path through the sky for that address. Then let the optimiser search facet combinations and mounting options and rank the strongest configurations.

Published

What this demonstrates

Computational design & optimisation. Deployed for clients as a BIM-linked solver: roof polygons and obstructions from the Revit or survey model, site-specific irradiance data, and the chosen array written back with per-module positions and electrical schedules.

Live roof model · real sun & shadows
Sydney NSW, Australia
alt 26.6° · az 30°

Loading 3D scene

Producing Overshadowed now0 of 30 shaded
Panels
30
portrait
DC capacity
13.2 kWp
440 W modules
Annual yield
17,878 kWh
clear-sky model
Specific yield
1354 kWh/kWp
incl. shading
Shading loss
1.0%
annualised
Roof utilisation
36%
of enabled facets
Roof facets
FacetPitchFacesAreaPanelskWh/yrkWh/kWpIn array
South facet24°South 195°58 m²125,7871096
North facet24°North 15°58 m²128,4921608
East facet24°East 105°25 m²31,7141298
West facet24°West 285°25 m²31,8851428

Where this data comes from

Illustrative pipeline for a production deployment

Roof geometry (Revit / survey)

Roof polygons, pitches and orientations from the BIM model or drone capture

Site context

Trees, chimneys and neighbouring massing as shading obstructions

Irradiance data

PVGIS, NASA POWER or Solcast site time series in production

Module & rail catalogue

Panel dimensions, electrical specs and mounting systems

Roof-aware solar solver

  1. 1Extract planar facets from the roof geometry
  2. 2Fit modules and rails facet by facet
  3. 3Ray-cast per-module shading across the year
  4. 4Optimise and rank array configurations

Output

BIM-ready array design

Per-module positions, string layout and yield report written back to the model

This demo runs a parametric roof and clear-sky irradiance; client deployments run the same solver on real roof polygons with site-measured data.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

How these demos relate to the systems we build for clients.

How is the roof actually modelled?

The building is parametric: gable, hip, skillion or flat forms are generated as a set of planar roof facets, each with its own pitch, orientation and outline, including the trapezoid and triangle faces of a hip roof. Flat roofs carry a drainage fall, and the rack frames follow the falling surface, so the fall adds to or subtracts from the effective panel tilt. Panels are flush-mounted facet by facet, clipped to each facet's real outline with an edge setback, and mounted on rails; flat roofs use tilted rack rows with a row-pitch rule instead. Client deployments replace the parametric form with the actual roof polygons from a Revit model or drone survey.

How is the overshadowing calculated, and what does the violet colour mean?

For every panel, at every sampled sun position, the engine tests whether the beam is blocked: behind-the-facet checks for panels facing away from the sun, ray-casts against the chimney, trees and neighbouring buildings, and row-to-row self-shading on flat-roof racks. A violet panel in the 3D view is receiving no direct beam at the displayed date and time. The annual simulation applies the same test across twelve representative days and reduces blocked hours to diffuse-only output, and the heat-map overlays recolour every module by its annual yield or annual shading loss, so a tree's burn mark on the array is visible at a glance.

What does the optimiser sweep, and what is the design score?

For pitched roofs it evaluates every combination of roof facets plus portrait or landscape mounting; for flat roofs it sweeps rack tilt and row pitch. Each configuration runs the full shading-aware annual simulation and is scored on annual energy, specific yield, shading loss and a design-coherence factor that rewards symmetric facet pairs and clean uninterrupted arrays over scattered token sub-arrays. Three objectives change the weighting: maximum yield, balanced design, or highest efficiency.

How accurate are the sun path and the energy numbers?

Sun altitude and azimuth come from a NOAA-style solar position calculation at the pinned latitude and longitude: the 3D dome shows the December and June solstice and equinox arcs plus hour markers for the selected month, and the shadows in the scene are cast from the real computed sun vector. Irradiance uses a clear-sky model, so yields are comparative rather than bankable: client deployments substitute PVGIS, NASA POWER or Solcast site data and add inverter, temperature and soiling models.

Want this for your products?

Everything in the Playground is built with the same stack we deploy for clients: configurators driven by real product masters, planners connected to BIM data, and AR experiences served straight from the product catalogue.

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