Expanding the simulation surface

[RicardoM]

Good morning everyone, I hope you're all holding out well working from home or whatever.

 

I usually create my simulations over a Google Maps image cropped to just the space I need so I can zoom in to the maximum and thus have more details. Then every once in a while I have the problem that I simulate a system and then the customer asks me to move the modules to an area close by but which is just outside the simulating area. For example, I just simulated the system shown below and the customer asked to move all the modules on the green building to the empty area to the north:

 

 

Is there anyway to expand the simulation surface so that I can take in the brown surface and not have to import a brand new image and start from scratch?

 

Thanks in advance, cheers!

[RicardoM]

If that is not possible, if there were a way to copy and paste objects from one simulation to another that would also be helpful, but I don't know how to do that either.

[developer_mh]

Dear Ricardo,

a movement of the underlying map/image is not possible, I am afraid. And unfortunately there is no way to copy objects from one project to another, neither. At least not the simple way.

A possible way exists, but this is a hacky workaround. It is unofficial and we don't do support for projects that are broken due to this hack. But if you want to try, you can do the following:

1. Save the first project twice (one for safety, and one you will modify)
2. Create a new project where you select the new map section as desired (with brown surface above). Try to select it in the same zoom level and x/y dimensions
3. Save the new project with a new name (e.g. "new map section.pvprj")
4. Close PV*SOL
5. Use a zip program like 7zip to unzip the file "new map section.pvprj"
6. Amongst the unzipped files, you will find one "MapExtract.png" and inside the folder Visu3D you'll find "SelfCreatedTexture150.png"
7. Copy these two images to another place, these are the new map sections for your old project
8. Unzip also the old project (the one you created for modification from step 1)
9. replace the files "MapExtract.png" and "SelfCreatedTexture150.png" with the ones you copied elsewhere (from step 7)
10. Select all files in that folder and zip them
11. Change the file extension from *.zip to *.pvprj
12. Open the modified project, and you can see that the map section was replaced. Now you would need to adjust the location of the building, but that is possible from within the software.

Hope that helps, and sorry if we can only provide this dirty workaround at the moment. Best wishes for you home office experience as well!

Kind regards,

Martin

[RicardoM]

Thanks Martin,

That almost looks like more work than starting from scratch, hehe. Are there any thoughts to provide a different solution in upcoming updates?

 

Thanks again, stay safe!

[hrauschmayer]

After "deactivating collision", you can move the object off the map