Your site’s shading, measured in 3D from IGN LiDAR
In metropolitan France, pvSpline rebuilds each project’s site from IGN’s national surveys: the buildings and their roofs, the terrain and the trees. Near shading is then measured in that scene, string by string, and the simulation uses the measurement in place of its analytic estimate.
A scene built from IGN data
- National surveys: LiDAR HD for roofs and trees, RGE ALTI for the ground, and BD ORTHO imagery draped over it.
- Buildings with their real roofs: LOD2 reconstruction gives each roof its form and pitch, so panels sit on the actual roof planes. Where none is published yet, footprints rise to their surveyed height, and the view says which you got.
- Trees as the LiDAR saw them: the canopy lets light through at the density the LiDAR measured.
- Your own models: drop in an architect’s model (glTF, FBX, OBJ, DAE, 3DS or STL) and it shades the yield.
Far, near and vegetation shading
A terrain skyline swept from each array sets the far shading: it can add a nearby ridge to the site’s horizon and never erases a distant one. The bake then measures the direct-beam shading of each panel group over the whole sun path, band by band within each string, so a partly shaded array loses yield string by string. The trees’ share of the loss gets its own line in the loss cascade.
Diffuse light and the rear side
The same bake measures each array’s sky-view factor, which sets the diffuse light it receives, and its rear-view factor, which sets the gain on the back of a bifacial module. Both take the place of the analytic geometry.
A figure you can defend
- The vegetation loss and its upper bound: bake with the canopy as measured, then with every crown opaque, and quote the pair.
- Trees that grow: bake for any month’s foliage, grow the trees forward in time, and clear the ground where the arrays will stand.
- A bake that knows when it is out of date: the engine fingerprints each array’s layout and the buildings around it, and drops a table that a later change has outdated, array by array.
- A look before the bake: the panel shadow overlay colours every panel by the share of direct sunlight it misses, as you scrub through the day.
In the browser, even on a tablet
The 3D view runs on a cloud GPU and streams to your browser, with nothing to install and no graphics card needed. Export the rebuilt site, trees and modules included, as STL, or record a sun-path flyover up to 4K.
A 3D shading study in four steps
- Draw the PV zones on the Map, then open the 3D site view.
- Keep every scene layer on: a hidden layer is left out of the measurement.
- Click Bake 3-D shading and follow its progress; a bake takes a few minutes.
- Save the project and run the simulation: the measured tables replace the analytic near-shading model.
Questions
Outside metropolitan France?
The IGN scene covers metropolitan France. Elsewhere, the simulation applies the site’s far horizon from PVGIS and its analytic near-shading model.
Is it part of the free plan?
Yes, the 3D site view is part of the free plan. Building a site’s tiles takes a verified account and counts against a monthly allowance of build time, and on the free plan paying customers’ builds go first.
How long does a bake take?
A few minutes. A progress bar shows the sun positions measured, the arrays done and the time left.
The fastest way to judge a simulation tool is to run it on a project you already know.