Canopy
Definition
Compared to the Building, Virtualwind impose less constraints on the geometric models of Canopy and Canopy Part. A Canopy Part can be any collection of triangular faces – they do not have to form a solid.
If you use Google SketchUp as the modeling tool to create the geometric models, you need to ensure that those faces which belong to the same Canopy Part are grouped as a Group or Component. Consult the Virtualwind Modeling Guidelines page in the help document of Virtualwind SketchUp Plugin or the Google SketchUp Tools manual for details on how to prepare Canopies for Virtualwind.
Creation and Deletion
Canopies cannot be created or deleted within Virtualwind. They can only be imported. But you can choose to ignore a canopy or a canopy part (same effect as deleting it from the simulation) by checking off its Model Status as explained below.
Settings
In the Entities & Monitors tree, Canopy entities are group under the Canopy Manager and each Canopy has one or multiple Parts. This forms a three-level hierarchy of Canopy Manager → Canopy → Canopy Parts (see the figure below). At each level, there is both a Model item and an Actor item associated with each instance. Since the geometric models of the Canopies are usually imported from a modeling software, such as Google SketchUp, there is not much you can do to manipulate these models aside from choosing the particular instance to be present or ignored in the simulation. To do this, check on or off, respectively, the Model Status check box of its model item. Once checked off, certain Actor settings are then applied so that you can easily tell it in the Viewport. By default, it is set to on for every canopy.
![]() |
The Actor items, however, provide a variety of means for you to control the appearance of these instances. The following figure shows a typical Actor item from which you can do the following:
- show or hide the particular instance in the viewport by checking on or off the View Status check box;
- show or hide the shading representation of the instance in the viewport by checking on or off the Shade check box;
- change the color of the instance by clicking on the Color box;
- show or hide the color of the instance stored from SketchUp by checking on or off the SKP_color check box;
- show or hide the wireframe representation of the instance in the viewport by checking on or off the Wireframe check box;
- show or hide the texture of the instance in the viewport by checking on or off the Texture check box;
- change the transparency of the instance by changing the number of X-Ray Intensity in the range of [0, 1]*.
![]() |