The Map & Site Design Tab

Where it lives and how it is laid out

Open the map icon in the left navigation rail, or go straight to /map. The view fills the window and has two regions:

• The map canvas covers the whole page: a pannable, zoomable, rotatable aerial view (IGN Ortho orthophotography, with its required attribution credit on screen). Your drawn zones sit on top of it as coloured polygons, each with draggable corner knobs and a floating parameter card. A compass instrument with a scale ruler and zoom buttons sits in the top-left corner.

• The docked panel floats over the imagery at the top right. It carries the site totals line, the Module opacity and Sensitivity sliders, the drawing-tool row, and three sections — PARAMETERS (all-zone overrides, present once at least one zone exists), Strings (DC) (the string painter and the equipment-pin tray) and Permit sheets (CERFA 16702). A chevron tab welded to the panel's left edge folds it out of the way (Hide panel / Show panel) when you want the bare imagery.

The view opens on the camera position saved with the project, or on the project's site coordinates if it has none. Pan by dragging the map, zoom with the wheel or the compass buttons, rotate by dragging the compass ring or by dragging the map with the right mouse button. Wherever the camera comes to rest is written back into the project a moment later, so reopening the tab — or the project — lands on the same frame.

With no project open the tab shows only an empty card: a project is opened, imported or created on The Project Tab, never here. New project there creates a new client's blank project at a placeholder location in central France, which this tab opens zoomed out on — enough to get going, but set the real site on The Project Tab before you draw.

The totals line

At the top of the docked panel, a one-line summary tallies the whole site: installed power in kWp, and the number of placed modules once a layout has been computed (the zone count before that), so you can read the site's size in one glance without leaving the drawing. The annual production is not repeated here; it is on Production and Results.

Drawing a zone

Every array begins as a zone: a closed polygon of three or more vertices. The tool row in the docked panel offers four ways to create one, an imagery helper, a heritage overlay and a visibility toggle. All of them drop the shape as a normal PV zone that immediately fills with modules; you can reclassify it afterwards from its card.

The creation tools

• Add polygon — drops a ready-made four-corner square, about 8 m on a side, at the current map centre and recentres on it. Drag its corner knobs to fit the roof. The fastest start for a simple rectangular roof.

• Draw a polygon — an armed mode: click the map to drop each vertex in turn, then click the first vertex again to close the ring (three vertices minimum). A rubber band follows the cursor from the last placed vertex, and a halo lights up around the first vertex when you are close enough to close on it. Right-click undoes the last vertex (and cancels the tool once the draft is empty), Esc cancels outright, and double-click or Enter closes the shape. A ribbon along the bottom of the map counts the placed vertices and carries Close polygon and Cancel buttons. Best for irregular outlines; click the tool again to disarm.

• Color picker — the magic-wand roof detector (see below). Also an armed mode.

• IGN buildings — fetches surveyed building footprints for the area in view and overlays them (see below). Also an armed mode.

• Import… — opens a file picker and recognises what you pick from the file itself, whatever its name. A Google Earth / GIS .kml adds every polygon outline it contains at its true coordinates; a CAD drawing (.dxf) opens the DXF placement panel, previewed on the map, before its outlines become zones (see Importing a CAD drawing (DXF)); a georeferenced image — a GeoTIFF, or a PNG or JPEG picked together with its world file and .prj — is drawn at its true position under the zones, as the canvas to design on where the IGN photography stops (see Designing on your own imagery). A one-shot action, not an armed mode, lit while a drawing is being placed; a progress bar tracks the upload, and a confirmation line reports how many outlines were imported. They take the values grouped in PARAMETERS and the drawing defaults for the rest, so adjust them on the cards afterwards. A file with nothing to import is refused with a line saying why — a DWG is to be exported as DXF first, a KMZ unzipped — and an over-sized file is refused before anything is uploaded (see the ceilings under CAD import below).

• Heritage protections — shows or hides the protected-heritage perimeters published for the area (see below). A display layer, not an armed mode.

• Show/hide polygon controls — toggles the floating per-zone cards on or off, so you can see the imagery under them or take a clean screenshot; the polygons and their corner knobs stay. The button lights up while the cards are hidden.

The magic-wand roof detector

The Color picker arms a flood-fill roof detector. Arming it hides every overlay so you are picking on the bare imagery — exactly the pixels the detector samples. Hover a roof and pvSpline grows a region outward from the pixel under the cursor, accepting neighbouring pixels whose colour (hue and brightness) is close to it, and previews the result as an oriented quad; click to turn that quad into a four-corner zone. It is ideal for a roof that stands out in colour from its surroundings.

The Sensitivity slider (0–100 %) controls how tolerant the match is: low values select only a tight patch of near-identical colour; high values sweep in a much wider colour range (and can spill past the roof edge). While the picker is armed the mouse wheel is repurposed — rolling it nudges the sensitivity by one point instead of zooming the map, and the preview re-floods under the unchanged cursor, so you can dial the tolerance in and watch the outline breathe. A ribbon along the bottom of the map says so and reads the live value back.

Adopting an IGN building footprint

IGN buildings asks the engine for the surveyed building outlines in the area currently in view and draws them as amber outlines, with the cadastral parcels shown beneath them while the tool is armed. Hovering one shows its recorded use and, where the survey has it, its height; the panel reports how many footprints came back, and warns you when there were too many to show them all (zoom in for the rest).

Click a footprint and a small menu opens at the cursor with two targets:

Shift-clicking a footprint skips the menu and goes straight to the building. Re-arm the tool after panning or zooming to refresh the overlay for the new area. The button is greyed out when the engine you are connected to does not offer the footprint service.

Checking heritage protections

Heritage protections overlays the perimeters of the French cultural-heritage protections published on the Géoportail de l'Urbanisme, with a legend: Surroundings of a historic monument (abords), Historic monument, Site classé or inscrit and Site patrimonial remarquable. Each protection keeps the Géoportail de l'Urbanisme's own hatching but takes a colour of its own — orange for the abords, magenta for a monument, teal for a site, blue for a site patrimonial remarquable — so where several overlap you can still tell them apart; the legend swatches show both. A protection found here shapes the permit dossier (The permit package (déclaration préalable)). The perimeters are drawn only at town scale or closer — zoomed further out, the legend says “Zoom in to town scale or closer to see the heritage perimeters.” If part of the layer fails to load, the panel warns that a blank patch is not proof of no protection; switch the layer off and on to retry. The source line under the legend reminds you that the list annexed to the municipality's urban plan remains the authority. The overlay steps aside while the colour picker is armed, and it changes nothing in the project.

Importing a CAD drawing (DXF)

Import… recognises a CAD drawing (.dxf) and turns its closed outlines — roofs or fields drawn in AutoCAD, BricsCAD, LibreCAD or QGIS — into zones. A .kml carries longitude and latitude, so its outlines land at once; a .dxf carries the drawing's own coordinates, so the outlines first appear in the DXF placement panel, previewed on the map as dashed teal outlines, until you import or cancel them. Nothing reaches the project before Import N outline(s).

What counts as an outline: a closed polyline, a polyline drawn back to its start, or lines on the same layer that join end to end into a loop with no branch. Arcs inside polylines are followed. Outlines under 1 m² once placed (text, symbols) are left out, and so are shapes drawn on a layout rather than in the model. Block references and hatches are not read: explode the blocks before exporting if the outlines are inside them. The panel's summary line says how many outlines are ready, their total area, and what was left out. A binary DXF or a DWG is refused with a line saying what to export instead.

Designing on your own imagery

Outside France the IGN photography stops at about city scale. Import… lets you design on your own image instead — a drone orthomosaic, a satellite scene, an aerial photograph exported from a national geoportal or a GIS. It is drawn at its true position over the basemap and under every zone, and the colour picker and the albedo estimate read it as they read the photography.

The image has to say where it lies. Pick either a GeoTIFF, which carries its position, or a PNG or JPEG together with its world file (.pgw, .jgw, .tfw, .wld) and, if you have it, its .prj: select the files together in the picker. Without a .prj, pvSpline guesses the coordinate system from the view, the way it places a DXF, and says so; if the image lands in the wrong place, upload it again with its .prj. An image with no position at all, or in a coordinate system pvSpline cannot convert, is refused with a line saying why — reproject it in your GIS, to WGS 84 / UTM or to longitude and latitude. The image is stored with the project, scaled down to at most 2,048 pixels on its longest side: ten centimetres a pixel over a 200 m roof. One image per project; a new upload replaces it.

Reclassifying a zone

Every new zone is a PV array by default. The Polygon type selector at the top-left of each card reclassifies it. Options are gated by corner count: a 3D building needs exactly four corners, a biome needs three or more, a video path needs only two — and the type a zone is already in is always listed, so the selector can never fail to show what it is.

Obstacle is the only type that removes modules from the zones it overlaps — a Building or a Biome drawn under a PV zone leaves that zone's fill intact.

Turning a PV zone into anything that holds no array — an obstacle, a building other than a carport, a biome or the video path — sets its installed power to 0: it then adds nothing to the totals line, the production or the bill of materials. Its panel choice is kept, should you turn it back into PV.

Editing a zone's shape

Each zone is bounded by draggable corner knobs, one per vertex, each filled with the zone's own colour. Drag any knob to move that corner; the panel fill re-runs live as you drag. Drag the body of a polygon — anywhere inside its fill — to translate the whole shape without changing it. Three shape aids sit on the edges and knobs:

• Add a vertex on this edge — hovering a zone reveals a small + chip on each of its edges; clicking one inserts a new corner at that edge's midpoint, so you can turn a quad into an L-shape. A rectangle-locked quad shows no chips: it owns its four corners.

• Right-click a knob to remove that vertex. A ring is never cut below a triangle, and a rectangle-locked quad owns its four corners, so only the knobs that can actually be dropped advertise the gesture in their tooltip.

• Rectangle lock — a toggle in the card header (or the global Rectangle row). While it holds, the polygon is forced to a true rectangle: two diagonal corners resize width and depth while preserving right angles, and the other two become rotation handles (they wear a grab glyph instead of the zone tint) that spin the whole rectangle about its centre. Ideal for regularly-framed ground-mount tables. Arming the lock also squares up a quad that had drifted slightly out of true, which is what lets the placer use its fast, perfectly-regular row layout.

A PV zone also carries an arrow showing which way its modules face (a pair of opposed arrows on an East–West dome or a vertical bifacial field), and the edge a footprint lock aligns to is drawn bold. A Building zone is labelled with the length of each wall at its midpoint and its footprint area at the centre, since a building is drawn for the shadow it casts and that shadow is the size of the box.

The card header also carries a compact toolbar: rotate the array 90° left or right, toggle Portrait (a 90° turn of the modules, on the map and in the 3D view), the two footprint locks, Delete, and a fold button that collapses the card to a single eye icon.

What you see while dragging, and what is finally recorded

Module placement runs on its own; there is no “compute layout” button. Two things are happening, and it is worth knowing which is which.

While you drag — a corner, a whole polygon, or a knob on a rectangle lock — the browser re-fills the zone on every frame, so the modules follow the shape with no waiting at all. That drawing is an estimate. The docked panel says so plainly while it is on screen: “Live estimate while you edit — the engine confirms it in a moment.”

When you let go — and about a third of a second after your last edit settles — the request goes to the simulation engine, which runs the same placer the simulation itself uses and answers with the authoritative layout. That answer replaces the drawing, and the resulting installed power is written into the project. From then on the numbers on screen are the ones the simulation will use.

In practice the two agree, cell for cell, on ordinary roofs. Where they differ, the difference is visible and lasts a fraction of a second, never silently stored. Two cases the in-browser estimate declines outright, leaving the last confirmed numbers up until the engine answers: a carport deck (whose deck layout has its own placer) and a zone whose module has no resolvable dimensions.

If the engine you are connected to does not offer the layout service, the panel says so and the in-browser estimate is all you get — still a usable drawing, just never confirmed. If a zone has nothing to pack (no outline, or no module assigned), the panel says that instead.

Per-zone parameters (the floating card)

Every zone gets its own card, floating on the imagery beside its polygon and tracking it as you pan, zoom and rotate. Cards that would land on top of each other push one another apart, so no card is ever edited through another. While a drag is in progress the cards step out of the way of the mouse entirely, so a vertex can be dragged above, through and past the card hanging beside its own polygon.

Card edits are staged and then committed half a second after you stop typing — so a typed “180” lands as one change rather than three — or at once when you leave the tab or start a run with Ctrl+Enter; every commit re-runs the fill and refreshes the stats line at the foot of the card.

Orientation and tilt

• Azimuth — panel azimuth (orientation) in degrees, -180 to 180 in tenths of a degree. The default 180 faces due south (optimal in the northern hemisphere). Use the rotate-left / rotate-right header buttons for quick 90° steps. Read-only while an automatic azimuth source is selected, and hidden entirely while Auto (longest side) holds — that lock owns the angle. A run warns, in its Warnings card, about a fixed array tilted 10° or more that faces within 20° of its hemisphere's pole — north of the equator, an azimuth within 20° of 0° — since it turns its back to the sun; a zone imported without an azimuth reads 0°, due north, and draws the same warning. Sites within 5° of the equator are spared.

• Auto (longest side) — a header toggle that locks the azimuth perpendicular to the polygon's longest edge, facing the equator, so the panels follow the roof ridge. While it holds, reshaping the polygon re-aims the modules on every frame and the azimuth field steps aside; the -90° / +90° buttons stay live and spend their quarter turn on the lock's offset.

• Tilt — panel inclination from horizontal, 0° (flat) to 90° (vertical), default 35°. Drives the transposition of irradiance onto the plane and the self-shading. It also re-packs the zone: the placer lays the rows out in plan, shortened by the cosine of the tilt (see below), so the module count and kWp follow it. Read-only while an automatic tilt source is selected, and locked at 90° on an Agrivoltaics (vertical bifacial) field.

• Portrait — turns the modules 90° so their long axis runs up the slope instead of across it, letting you match portrait versus landscape mounting. It rotates both the modules drawn on the map and the racks in the 3D view, and it re-packs the layout on the spot.

• Tracker — a read-only line, above the card's angle fields, on a zone whose modules are on a sun tracker: Single-axis (they turn through the day about a horizontal axis) or Two-axis (they face the sun all day). The simulation then sets the modules' tilt hour by hour — and on a two-axis tracker their azimuth too — rather than using those fields. On a single-axis zone the Azimuth gives the direction of the axis: 180° (or 0°) is a north–south axis. On a PVGIS run the irradiance follows the module type's tracker kind: a vertical, horizontal east–west or tilted single-axis type gets that tracker's irradiance, and the horizontal north–south type gets an east–west tracker's when the azimuth lies within 45° of east or west, a north–south one's otherwise; the exact azimuth sets the angle-of-incidence, backtracking, wind-stow and rear-side calculations. The soiling and snow losses computed from the weather take a single-axis tracker at its rotation limit, and a two-axis tracker, or a single-axis one whose type sets no limit, at 45°, whatever the Tilt (Running a Simulation & the Production Tab). The zone takes its tracking from its module type — the tracker with its strategy, rotation limit, backtracking GCR and wind stow — when that type is assigned to it: a Panel type pick on this card, the PARAMETERS Type row, or a new zone, which starts on the first favourite in the list. A type made as a tracker in Catalogue makes the zone track, and a fixed type makes it fixed again; nothing on the card overrides it for one zone. The zone then keeps that tracking until a module is assigned to it again, so if a zone on a tracker type shows no such line, pick another module and then the tracker one. A fixed zone shows no such line.

Where the tilt and azimuth come from

Tilt source and Azimuth source are two dropdowns, one under each angle. They are the answer to “who owns this number” — and they are per angle, so an array whose tilt follows a measured roof while its azimuth stays hand-set is perfectly normal.

A status line under the selectors says what the last lookup produced for this array — the angle adopted, or why nothing was: PVGIS returned no optimum for the site, IGN has no roof pitch for these arrays, no pitched roof was found under this one, the zone has no outline to look an angle up at, or the engine could not be reached. On a site with many arrays, the PARAMETERS panel adds a one-line tally of how many of them took an angle at all.

Module spacing and the power cap

The placer steps a grid across the zone at (module dimension + gap). Two gaps and a cap shape the layout:

• Col — gap between adjacent modules within a row, in metres (default 0.02 m = 2 cm). Changing it re-runs the placement.

• Row — gap between module rows, in metres (default 0.02 m). Wider row gaps reduce inter-row self-shading at the cost of density. Hidden on an East–West dome, where the coverage ratio sets the row pitch instead.

• kWp max — a peak-power cap (kWp) for this zone. The placer stops adding modules once the installed power would exceed the cap, using the zone's own module wattage. 0 means no cap. Applying a Batch scenario that changes the installed power or the module sets this cap on the PV zones, so the layout keeps the scenario's size (Deciding and applying); raise or clear it to let a zone fill again.

The kWp and kWp max fields leave the card when the global kWp max row is broadcasting, and when the array is the project's only zone apart from obstacles and the video path, where the global row is that array's own.

On a tilted plane the placer works in plan: a module's depth and the row gap are drawn as they appear from above, shortened by the cosine of the tilt (up to 85°). A plain zone tilted 85° or more is treated as a wall — a facade or a vertical fence — whose rows stand one above another in the 3D view.

Ground reflectance (albedo)

• Albedo — the fraction of light reflected off the ground beneath the array (0.00–0.95, default 0.20). It feeds the bifacial rear-side gain. Grass/dry soil ≈ 0.20; sand/white concrete ≈ 0.50; fresh snow ≈ 0.85.

• Ground — a material preset dropdown; picking a material sets the matching albedo automatically. Custom keeps the value in the field. A value you type leaves the dropdown on the material it showed, though the run uses your value; an Auto estimate that differs from the material switches it to Custom.

• Auto — when on, the albedo is estimated from the map imagery directly beneath the panels and re-estimated after every reshape; the manual albedo and material controls go read-only. Off by default for a freshly drawn zone.

Mounting and geometry modes

• On water — a wave-glyph toggle on the Field line. It marks the array as pond/reservoir-mounted, switching the engine to a floating thermal model and open-water albedo. It is a mounting property, so it stacks on top of whatever field geometry you chose.

• Field — the zone's rack/field-geometry archetype, one choice per zone: Free, the mutual-shading geometries, or East-West dome. Selecting any of them reveals its own sub-fields (row pitch, blade width, mounting height, and so on). The choices are mutually exclusive by design — a dome's coverage ratio already describes its rows, so the engine would ignore a field geometry stated on top of it.

• East-West dome (the last option of Field) — turns the zone into two interleaved low-tilt planes facing opposite directions. Dome GCR (ground-coverage ratio, 0.05–0.95) sets the ridge pitch — and therefore the panel count and installed kWp — and drives the inter-row shading; enabling a dome that has never had one seeds it at 0.70. East share (0–1.0, default 0.50 for a symmetric dome) is the area fraction of the primary (east) face. A dome is fixed-tilt and not bifacial-compatible.

Building-integrated PV

BIPV says how this array is built into the building envelope, which decides the thermal model applied to it. The choice supersedes the module datasheet's NOCT, which is measured on an open rack.

Mounting structure

Mounting structure picks the racking kit the zone's modules are mounted on. It lists the mounting kits you hearted in the catalogue (The Component Catalogue), the zone's own kit when it is not one of them, and Add from the catalogue…, which opens the catalogue on its Mounting structures tab. The bill of materials then counts what the kit needs under them, row by row from the packed layout: a row's end or an obstacle's gap ends a run of modules on shared rails, every run is clamped at both ends, and the rails, splices, end and mid clamps, attachments, end caps and earthing clips are listed under Mounting structure, next to the modules. The rail bars are counted with their offcuts reused. None (the default) leaves the zone out of the structure lines. A carport deck has the row too.

The PARAMETERS panel's Structure row offers the same list for every array at once. While it is ticked — as it is from the start while every array stands on one kit, and always in a project with a single zone apart from obstacles and the video path — the cards show no Mounting structure, and a kit picked on the row mounts every array on it, carport decks included. Untick the row to give each zone a kit of its own.

The shipped kits are generic: rail kits for a tiled roof and a sheet-metal roof, rails up the slope for modules in landscape, a ballasted flat-roof kit and ground-mount purlins. Their attachment spacing in particular follows the site's snow and wind loads, so replace them with the supplier's kit and its structural calculation before ordering: add it on the catalogue's Mounting structures tab, typed in or imported from its .yaml file, and heart it.

The permit package reads the kit too: the fixing method it implies, how far the modules stand above the covering, the roof or the ground, and the kit itself go on its DP3 and DP11 pages (The permit package (déclaration préalable)). The shipped kits' heights are generic as well, so state the supplier's figure there.

Building, carport and CAD sub-cards

When a zone's Polygon type is Building, the card swaps its PV fields for 3D-authoring controls that drive the The 3D Earth Site View viewer. A building holds no modules (a carport is the exception — its deck really does carry modules), but it still counts in the yield through its shade: the 3D shading bake measures the arrays among the buildings drawn here, so a building drawn, deleted, moved or changed after a bake makes every stored table stale until you bake again. Building model picks between House, Factory, Carport and CAD import:

• House and factory — a Height (1–100 m, default 10 m), which drives the shadow the building casts on the array, and an Azimuth (-180 to 180°) that rotates the modelled body.

• Carport — no height or azimuth row (its deck height comes from its own dimensions, and it rotates through the PV azimuth control). Instead: a Butterfly (E-W) toggle for two opposed slopes per pivot, and six millimetre dimensions — Row spacing, Column spacing, Butterfly gap, Height, Width, Length. These are not cosmetic: the deck placer reads them, so they change the packed module layout as well as the 3D model. A carport keeps the rotation trio, the azimuth and the tilt (which sets the deck tilt, and on a butterfly the common low-face tilt) with their source selectors, but not the ground-PV rows — panel type, spacing, albedo, kWp cap, field geometry and BIPV. The deck still uses the zone's module and albedo, which on a carport only the PARAMETERS Type and Albedo rows change, and its kWp cap, which on a carport only the kWp max row sets: that row, like the Tilt and 3D rows, reaches the arrays — the PV zones and the carport decks — and passes houses, other buildings and biomes by. Its modules always sit 0.02 m apart in both directions, and the run treats it as a free-standing array with its module's own mounting, whatever on-water, BIPV, field or dome setting the zone still carries. With Butterfly (E-W) on, the run simulates the deck as two faces of equal area at the deck tilt, one facing the zone's azimuth and one the opposite way, with no row-to-row shading, so a bifacial module keeps its rear-side gain; off, as one plane facing the azimuth. Above the dimensions sits a 3D preview of four decks drawn from these values, with the posts, the module grid and parked cars for scale: drag it (or use the arrow keys) to turn it, or pick Iso, Front, Side or Top. Clicking into a dimension, the tilt or the azimuth draws that measurement in metres and, with Auto-frame on, turns the camera to show it. Spacing runs pivot to pivot, so when neighbouring decks would overlap the preview draws them as outlines and names the smallest spacing that clears them. A summary line under it gives each deck's size in plan and the height of its low edge, and warns when that edge would sit below ground or under head height.

• CAD import — attaches a 3D scene that becomes this building's body in place of a procedural mesh, and that shades the arrays around it like any building. Import 3D model… accepts .glb, .gltf, .dae, .3ds, .fbx, .obj and .stl; the engine converts everything but the glTF pair, which is stored as-is. The card names the attached scene and offers Detach. The model is filed in your company's cloud model store, where the streamed 3D view fetches it; if it cannot be stored there, it is not attached and the card says why. Scale (0.01–1000×, default 1.00) is a uniform multiplier on the imported scene.

Biome sub-card

A Biome is a vegetation region: it carries no modules, so no array attribute is offered on it at all. Biome type chooses Pine forest (the default), Poplar forest or Farmland. Forests take Coverage (0-1) and Density (0-1), both defaulting to 0.5 — the fraction of the area planted, and the tree density as a fraction of maximum.

Farmland adds a Crop picker (None, Sunflowers, Corn, Wheat, Dirt). One control owns three things: the 3D plant meshes, the growth species, and the growth curve, which is reseeded from the new crop's preset when you actually change crop — a curve tuned for wheat is meaningless for corn — and left alone when you re-pick the same one. Below it, Plant distance sets the spacing between plants in centimetres (default 50) and Garden bed spawns a garden-bed mesh beneath the crop.

Video-path sub-card

A zone set to Video becomes the project's 3D camera track. The camera rides a smooth curve through the points, first to last — the path stays open — and it carries no PV modules. The map draws the exact curve the video will fly, with its points on top of it as numbered amber knobs in travel order. They work much like a zone's corner knobs:

• Drag a knob to move that point. The curve follows live as you drag.

• Right-click a knob to remove that point. A path keeps at least two points, so the last two do not advertise the gesture; to remove the whole path, delete it from its card.

• Add a point here — hovering the path reveals a small + chip halfway along each stretch, sitting on the curve itself; clicking one adds a point there, so the curve barely moves.

• Extend the path — one more + chip sits just past each end; clicking it adds a point beyond that end, ready to drag into place.

Each point keeps its own camera height through every edit: a point added between two others takes the mean of their heights, and one added past an end takes that end's height.

• Camera — the compass direction (-180 to 180°) the camera faces while travelling. Disabled while Focus nearest panels is on.

• Focus nearest panels — aims the camera at the closest PV array as it travels, handing focus from array to array, instead of holding the fixed direction.

• Lens zoom — the shot's optics (0.5–8×, default 1×). 1× is the natural lens, higher values narrow the view like a telephoto, 0.5× widens it.

• Height — camera height above the ground for the whole path, in metres (1–500, default 8 m).

• Per-point heights — gives every path point its own camera height instead of one uniform value; a numbered row (P1, P2, …) appears per waypoint. The camera climbs and dives smoothly between them.

• Follow terrain — on by default: the camera follows the terrain dynamically, holding its height above the ground under it. Off, it flies level at the path's mean terrain height plus the camera height.

The camera heights are geometry and commit immediately, like a vertex drag; the other knobs ride the card's half-second commit. Only one zone can be the video path at a time — setting a second one converts the first back to a PV footprint (or removes it, if it was only a two-point stub).

Global (all-zone) parameters

The PARAMETERS section in the docked panel applies one value to every zone at once, so you do not have to edit each card. Each row starts with a small apply-to-all checkbox: tick it and the row's control appears, and from then on every change you make to it applies to every zone. Leave it clear and the row is simply not managed globally — each zone's own card owns the value.

What the tick itself does depends on the row. Type, 3D, Albedo (unless its Auto is on), Spacing and kWp max apply the value they show to every zone the moment you tick them, and ticking Rectangle locks every four-corner zone. Structure, Tilt, Field, On water and BIPV only reveal their controls: nothing reaches the zones until you set a value there.

Where the zones share one tilt, the Tilt box shows it. Where they differ, it is empty and reads Mixed, and each zone keeps its own tilt and tilt source until you change the row: a value you type is applied to every PV zone when you press Enter or leave the box, and a source you pick, at once. Clearing the box applies nothing. Buildings and biomes count in that reading, even those whose cards show no tilt: a house drawn at the default 35° makes the row read Mixed beside a 20° roof. The value you set reaches the arrays alone, though — the PV zones and the carport decks, never a house or another building, nor a biome — so with a house drawn, the row reads Mixed again the next time the project opens. A zone you draw afterwards starts at 35°, not at the row's value; unless that value is 35, the row then reads Mixed until you type the value again.

While a row is ticked, the matching control disappears from the per-zone cards, rather than offering an edit the next broadcast would overwrite. Untick the row and the cards get their control back. This holds for Tilt even while it reads Mixed: the cards' Tilt and Tilt source are hidden although the row has applied nothing, so to give two roof faces different tilts, leave Tilt unticked and set each card. A carport deck takes the row's tilt like any other array.

The rows are Type (the panel model), Structure (the mounting kit), Tilt (with its source selector), 3D (Altitude offset and Levelling), Albedo (with Ground material and Auto), Spacing (Col and Row), kWp max, Rectangle, Field (with its geometry sub-rows, the East–West dome included) sharing a line with On water, and BIPV.

A row that changes the layout — Type, Tilt, Spacing, kWp max, Rectangle, and Field with its sub-rows — re-packs every zone it reaches, and their installed power follows just as after a card edit: the cards' kWp, the totals line and the next run all use the new layout.

Painting DC strings

The Strings (DC) section assigns each placed module to a DC string directly on the map, tinting the modules in each string's own colour. This is the map-side view of the wiring you also manage on Electrical Design & the One-Line Diagram.

A single row carries the whole readout: Mod./string, a ribbon, a count and the live-mode checkbox. The ribbon draws the wiring to scale — one segment per string, its width proportional to the panels assigned to it, painted in that string's own map tint — with anything placed but unwired trailing as an outlined stub. Hover the count beside it for the sentence in full: assigned / total panels · strings.

Automatic wiring

Auto strings is on by default. It keeps every zone wired into serpentine strings of Mod./string modules each (1–64), the modules left over at the end of a zone forming one shorter string, and re-runs whenever the modules change — as you add, remove, reshape or rotate panels. Mod./string is the same value as the DC-sizing modules-per-string on Electrical Design & the One-Line Diagram; changing it in either place changes it in both. While the mode is on, the manual painting tools are hidden, because the next automatic pass would overwrite a hand edit.

The wiring is also where the number of strings comes from. Once modules are placed, Diagram counts its strings from the map — the strings Auto strings wires, or, with it off, the strings you paint — so its Strings field is read-only and a line under it says where the number comes from (Electrical Design & the One-Line Diagram). Each zone is wired on its own, so two zones of 15 and 3 modules at 11 a string make three strings, not two.

With Limit string length to MPPT window ticked under Diagram's DC array sizing and both site temperatures set, a zone whose module would take a string of Mod./string modules past the inverter's maximum MPPT voltage on the coldest morning is wired in shorter strings instead — as many modules as that module allows in series. Only that zone changes: the others keep Mod./string.

Manual painting

Untick Auto strings to paint by hand. The existing wiring is kept as your starting point, and from then on the number of strings is the highest string number you paint.

• Paint — arms painting: click a module to add it to the active string, or drag a stroke across many modules at once (which is how you wire a 400-module field without 400 clicks). Shift-click a module to pick up its string as the active one. Right-click, or pressing Paint again, finishes.

• New — starts painting a fresh string with the next free number.

• Eraser — paints with “unassigned”, removing modules from their string. Shift-click still picks up a string; right-click finishes.

• Clear — unassigns every module from every string.

A banner across the panel says which string you are painting, and a legend lists each string as String n · k panel(s) in its colour — click a legend row to make that string the active one.

Placing equipment pins

Inside the same Strings (DC) section sits the equipment-pin tray: a palette for inverter, combiner and AC-service-panel markers, used to estimate cable lengths for the bill of materials. The tray auto-fills with one chip per unplaced device, drawn from the inventory you set on Electrical Design & the One-Line Diagram; when every device is placed it reads All markers placed. Pins are placed against the imagery, not against the modules, so they are available before a single panel is packed.

Three gestures place and remove a pin:

Inverter pins are amber, combiners blue and the AC panel green, echoing the chip colours.

Capturing the permit sheets

The Permit sheets (CERFA 16702) section is the shutter for the French déclaration préalable dossier. The sheets it captures are pictures of this map, so the framing has to happen here; everything else about the dossier — thumbnails, site photographs, parcel identification, declared work, installer details — lives on the Town-hall permit tab of Results (The permit package (déclaration préalable)).

Frame the map, then press a sheet: zoom out for the location plan, zoom onto the roof for the roof plan. Four buttons carry their CERFA piece codes and a state mark:

Each button reports one of four states in its tooltip and its mark: captured; the array moved since this was framed — recapture it; captured earlier; this browser has no copy — recapture it (a dossier carried in from elsewhere, or one that outlived a reload); or not captured.

Arriving from the dossier's Frame on the map (which opens /map with the sheet named in the address) puts the tab into framing mode: the panel unfolds, the map jumps to that sheet's stored frame if it has one, and a prompt offers Capture, Back to the stored frame and Cancel for that sheet alone. Capturing it hands you straight back to the dossier.

The compass, the scale and moving the view

The map's top-left corner carries one instrument rather than a scattering of controls:

• A bearing badge at the top prints the map's rotation in degrees.

• A rotation ring with cardinal letters and tick marks: press inside the ring band and drag to turn the map; double-click to swing back to north. With the ring focused, the arrow keys turn the map 1° at a time (10° with Shift) and Home returns to north.

• A shelf at the foot with Zoom out, the scale ruler and Zoom in. The ruler measures a round distance (1, 2, 5 or 10 times a power of ten) and prints it in metres or kilometres.

• A GPS hub at the dial's centre — Centre the map on my position. The browser asks permission the first time. If it refuses, or cannot report a position, a line under the instrument says which: the browser cannot report a position, permission was refused, or location services are off.

The Module opacity slider (0–100 %, default 100) sets how opaque the placed-module preview is drawn over the imagery. It is a display control only — it changes nothing about the layout or the yield — and is the quickest way to check what is actually under an array.

The map offset and the 2D–3D sync

The zones you draw here are the single source of truth for the 3D The 3D Earth Site View viewer: adding, moving, reshaping or reclassifying a polygon streams straight into the 3D scene, where the same panels, buildings and biomes appear on real terrain. Both the in-browser estimate under your cursor and the engine's confirmed layout reach the viewer, coalesced to a few updates a second, so a 3D session open alongside this tab follows your drawing as you make it. The zones' own document changes — buildings, biomes, a committed card — travel the same way.

Because the 3D terrain tileset and the 2D basemap can sit on slightly different datums, a map offset (an east/north shift in metres, -200 to +200 in half-metre steps) aligns them. You set it from The 3D Earth Site View, either with its two offset fields or with its automatic alignment, and pvSpline stores it with the project and re-applies it every time you open the site. Nothing on this tab changes it.

The Video zone you place here is the camera track the 3D view's sun-path video export flies through.

Field reference

Docked panel chrome

Drawing toolbar

Zone card — header

Zone card — PV attributes

Zone card — albedo, spacing, mounting

Field-geometry sub-fields

Building, carport and CAD sub-card

Biome sub-card

Video-path sub-card

Global parameters (docked panel)

Each row has an apply-to-all checkbox; while it is ticked, the matching per-zone control is hidden and every change to the row applies to every zone. Ticking Structure, Tilt, Field, On water or BIPV only reveals the row; the other rows apply their value as soon as they are ticked (Albedo unless its Auto is on). A zone added while a row is ticked starts on the drawing defaults rather than the row's value, and leaving the tab or reloading the page clears the ticks. The checkboxes disappear (and every row applies) when the project has at most one zone apart from obstacles and the video path. The rows leave the video path's camera track alone, and an obstacle's shape and angles too, except that Rectangle also locks a four-corner obstacle and an automatic source picked on the Tilt row also re-angles obstacles. Tilt, 3D and kWp max reach the arrays — the PV zones and the carport decks — and pass houses, other buildings and biomes by.

Strings (DC) and equipment pins

Permit sheets and the map instruments