The installation will have three of these racks (all the same) mounted on the flat roof of the building that can be seen in the webcam I linked above. It is an academic building currently under construction that I designed at a local college here in Prince Edward Island, Canada. The PV's are intended more as a demonstration to the students since there aren't enough to power the building. Every little bit helps of course. The facility will have a geothermal system and stormwater is collected for flushing toilets.

I think it is excessively strong but because there is a structural engineer involved I have to defer to his best judgement and calculations. The rack shown is about 11 feet wide and will be exposed to relatively strong winds. Just the other day we had 60-to-70 mph gusts and that was at ground level. That was a fairly routine storm. We get worse ones a few times a year and the rooftop where these will be located (here's a webcam of the construction site) is above the tree canopy.

I can post the solar pv texture I used when I get home tonight.

I predict a new "sport": Synchronized AR.Drone Flying where a teams of pilots put on competitive performances of synchronized maneuvers choreographed to music. (Each pilot on a team would have to 'fly' an individual drone --- not just have an app that flies them all from one controller). I think such displays of skill would be very popular.

and a couple more...

more images...

I see Adam (EarthMover) has posted his solar pergola project. That encouraged me to post some images of the pv installation I'm working on.

We will be putting three of these racks on the roof of a four-storey building. The design reflects that earlier in the project three roof anchor posts were installed for each of the eventual racks. Now that the racks are being designed we have to make it all work with where those posts were installed. Another design constraint is we have a restriction that the installations can have a maximum height above the roof of just four feet.

This is actually my second version of the rack design. I screwed up the earlier one when I didn't read carefully enough the shop drawing for the 235 watt modules we are using (Sharp NU-U235F1). Turns out that Sharp requires that the long sides of each panel be fully supported. [These panels can't be installed like those in Adam's design]. The need for that continuous support combined with the structural engineer's recommendation that it be fabricated from W6x8.5 structural sections has it being a relatively heavy rack. The steel will all be hot-dip galvanized.

The SketchUp model was rendered using the new Render[In] plugin. The purpose of the model was to work out a design approach our team could agree on and to do it accurately enough that we can take off the important dimensions for our steel fabricators.

Regards, Ross

Probably good for the peeping toms too!

Great modelling Julie and nice results with Podium!

I see the light 'hotspots' in two of the images. Must be a real bummer for you to get those when otherwise your results are so great.

Regards, Ross

Render[In] has released a new Beta today with improvements asked for in the forum.

@unknownuser said:

Release summary:
Get view size - Now you can automatically get the SketchUp Window size in the Render[in] parameters.
Stop Rendering - You can now stop the rendering anytime.
Smoothing geometry - No more problems with smoothing!
QuickTime - We need QuickTime for several reasons with Render[in]; now we check at startup that QuickTime is installed.
Create light - The issues concerning complex geometry creating light have been corrected.
Memory leaks - We have corrected some memory leaks, we keep checking.

Regards, Ross

@mike lucey said:

While it does not produce full photo-realistic renders to my eyes...

To my eyes the results of my scene with the rocker are reasonably photo-realistic. The limitations seem more related to the model & texturing than to the rendering plugin. For instance the rocker is very low poly -- had it been modeled smoother the result would have been more photo-realistic. The windows are relatively high poly and they came out very realistic to my eyes.

To me the situation is similar to Podium. In the hands of someone like Solo high photo-realism can be achieved. For the rest of us it is a big challenge. We can blame the software

Regards, Ross

Andrew - Fotosketcher applies adjustable filter-type effects to whatever image you bring in. It processes the image and allows you to save it. It is a simple application. Where it excels is the effects can be more realistic than the typical photoshop plugin intended to produce similar results.

What you get out of fotosketcher relates to what you put in. It won't for instance remove the lines from your typical sketchup output. It can definitely be used as part of a 'Dennis' type method where individual images are overlaid. I attach a simple example featuring a holding cell. A sketchup 'colours-only' export was processed in fotosketcher. A 'line-only' export was processed with a photoshop filter (EyeCandy 'Jiggles') and they were overlaid with transparency.

Regards, Ross

Very impressive Creasia!

rcossoli - I like your combined image. When you combined you managed to minimize the lines from your Fotosketch version. That's good because in it they were really heavy. I'm not a fan of how fotosketcher & other filter-based manipulations draw lines at the found edges -- they seem unnatural to me.

I hope you don't mind that I attach a simple watercolour created from your VRay render. I find the watercolour results from fotosketcher significantly better than any other filter-type software I've tried or seen. I think the fotosketcher watercolour results are very presentable. It would be interesting to see how they'd look printed onto watercolour paper.

Regards, Ross

Here's the fotosketch watercolour settings I used

You know that first model looked alot better than most of our first models!

Earlier I posted an image rendered with the Render[It] plugin. I've since modified the original image using multiple FotoSketcher processed images, overlayed with the original, to build up a painted effect. I spent about 45 minutes on the rendering.

Regards, Ross

There is an online users guide here and an online reference guide here. They aren't pdf's so you can't download either in one shot. You can print each page if you have enough patience. I don't.

Maybe Aidan Chopra will be updating his SketchUp for Dummies book??

Looks good Michalis. I like the rusty steel effect.

Does Gimp support photoshop-compatible plugins?

I think the results in this example were pretty good. The big problem is some faces on the rocker were dropped. They all looked okay in the SketchUp model & backfaces are pointing the right way.

I note that in this case the bump feature seems to have worked on the carpet.

Regards, Ross

Try "paints"

Mike- next time you get your two daughters in a room together why don't you test your theory. Team up with one and trick the other. Or even better - you be the one doing the secret smacking.