by Lucky Balaraman,  CEO, TMG

It is common knowledge that the Chinese are outstandingly successful in anything they set their minds to. Indian IT firms take note: the Chinese have now decided to become leaders in providing IT services.

An informative report in PCWorld makes one realize that Chinese IT firms are perfectly mimicking Indian IT powerhouses today in order to decimate those powerhouses tomorrow.

• The Chinese are shoring up revenues from domestic customers (to the level of 45% of total revenue)
• They are taking the best practices learned from international customers (like GE) and using them for other customers
• They have decided to move towards developing enterprise product solutions
• They are expanding their nearshore offices in Europe and the US

The buzz in India is that the Chinese will overrun India’s software export business in around five years. Hopefully by that time Indian IT firms would have moved further up the value chain to a place of temporary safety.

by Lucky Balaraman, CEO, TMG

The three-part expose is complete! With the below episode a regular reader now has very good idea of how a solar designer plans all aspects of a solar power system.

The expose will benefit solar panel installers, property owners and the engineering community. In case you want to view the first two episodes, they are on our video channel at:

http://www.youtube.com/user/TMGvblog

Here’s Part 3/3:

In case you are a solar panel installer, learn more about our solar design service here.

See you there,

by Lucky Balaraman, CEO, TMG

If you ever wondered how solar designers designed the solar panel arrays you see on so many rooftops nowadays, this article tells it all.

The solar designer needs these inputs about the target site to start on a design project:

• A dimensioned view of the roof
• Dimensioned locations of protuberances like vent pipes and chimneys
• Rough positions of the proposed solar panel arrays
• The make and model number of the solar modules to use
• The expected power output of the system
• Information about rafter width and spacing
• Preferred locations for supporting components such as the sunrun meter, the load center and the inverters

THE PROCESS

The solar designer then performs the following steps:

1. He decides where to place the arrays. This can be broken down into several subordinate activities:

a) He drafts the roof to scale, and incorporate all the protuberances at their exact locations (if the drawing looks cluttered, he drafts a callout view for individual roof slopes)

b) He chooses slopes which will have maximum exposure to the sun during summer and winter. This is usually a South-facing slope. He could also choose the East or West-facing slopes, but there would be a small loss in efficiency when compared to arrays mounted on the South-facing slope.

c) He tries to avoid locating the arrays on a North-facing slope since there is considerable loss of efficiency in doing this.

d) He also considers shadows from tall elements (like trees) adjacent to the proposed installation and avoid placing arrays in them.

NOTE: Usually the site engineer provides a sun study, and simply following his recommendation for the proposed location and orientation of modules is enough to satisfy the above conditions.

Solar modules can be divided into two types, DC and AC. Multiple modules are assembled into arrays on metal frames. These arrays are called strings in the case of DC modules and branches in the case of AC modules.

e) A string can have between 7 and 12 modules per array, whereas a branch can have between 8 and 15 modules.

f) Within an array, we ensure modules have around 1” clearance between them in the horizontal direction and around 3” clearance in the vertical direction (this may differ with respect to the make and model of solar modules used).

g) The solar designer positions arrays on the roof with sufficient clearance from the ridges, eaves and other edges of the roof. 12” is usually enough, but this can differ depending on the make and model of modules and the mounts used.

h) After orienting the solar modules, the solar designer locates and plots the position of the attachment points on the roof, and defines the attachment mounts that have to be used. He positions the attachment points on the roof to be located on the centers of rafters. Normally the solar designer positions them at 48" O.C.

NOTE: There are different types of attachment mounts the designer can use; the choice depends on the type of roof. For instance, he would use “Flatjack” for composite shingle roofs and “Fastjack” for virtually any roof that requires a flashed install.

The solar designer estimates the location of the rafters by offsetting a line 24" from the right or left edge of the roof, then offsetting multiple lines at distances of 48" till the end of the roof.

He takes care not to position a module on a single attachment point and not to let the unsupported edge of a module be more than 16".

The solar designer takes into account the load-bearing capacity of attachment mounts when deciding the total number of attachment mounts needed to support an array.

2. The next step is to draft the electrical connections from the solar arrays to their electrical support components, including the metering panel.

For this, the solar designer finds the shortest route (avoiding diagonal crossings that create unpleasant aesthetics) on the roof and draws a single line to connect the arrays to a junction box, then on to the sunrun meter, inverter, load center and metering panel. He also follows any special instructions that our installer-customers had noted on the site survey document.

The solar designer places the junction boxes at a convenient location near the modules and in such a manner as to use a minimum length of wire from each string or branch. He ensures there is sufficient clearance around the sunrun meter, load center and inverter for easy service access.

He adds an earth electrode to the drawing if it doesn’t exist near the metering panel.

THE RESULTING DRAWING SHEET SET

A typical design sheet set consists of:

An index page drawing containing:

• A site plan showing roads adjacent to the site
• A satellite view (in color) of the site
• A map view showing the adjacent areas

A second sheet containing:

• A dimensioned roof plan showing the locations of the solar arrays and attachment points
• An attachment detail
• A GA drawing of the electrical metering area

A third sheet containing:

• An electrical schematic
• Instructions for signage
• A materials list
• Notes

(A placard layout may also be needed to conform to local laws)

All the above sheets are converted to PDF format for the convenience of users who do not have access to or expertise in the specialized CAD software used to create all the above sheets.

IN CONCLUSION:

As in the case of any seemingly complex activity, solar design is easy to perform if one has procedural knowledge and ample experience. (TMG, of course, possesses these qualifications. If you are interested in sampling TMG’s design capabilities, please go to our solar designer page.)

To your excellent solar design,

by Lucky Balaraman, Executive Director, TMG

I just read an interesting news report on how Intel has used BIM (building information modeling) for laying out the machinery in its new plant in Oregon (http://www.sparpointgroup.com/News/Vol09No06-Intel-using-BIM-for-tool-install-at-new-Oregon-facility/)

BIM represents a game-changing advance in technology, albeit one that has been slow to catch on. It is refreshing to see a world technology leader adopting it. Hopefully many will follow.

According to the above report, Jason Hosch, senior industrial engineer at Intel, said,  "and you can’t buy software for BIM.”  I think he should have phrased this more appropriately, since purpose-built software is very much a part of the BIM picture (talk Revit, ArchiCAD, for instance).

I would have said, "BIM software is not all there is to BIM."

By the way, if you would like your BIM work done at Asian rates, send the work to TMG. To know more about our BIM activities, go to:

 http://themagnumgroup.net/building-information-modeling.htm

Best,

For quite some time, computers have been producing 3D visualizations (also called “renderings”) that are similar to photographs. In many cases it is difficult to discern a visualization from a photograph. But the experienced eye knows what to look for. Here are the signs of a 3D visualization, compiled by an expert visualizer (it often “takes a visualizer to catch a visualizer ”… )

For the purposes of this explanation, we categorize 3D visualizations into two types: interior visualizations and exterior visualizations.

Recognizing an Interior Visualization

Any three of the following criteria prove that an image of the interior of a building is a 3D visualization and NOT a photograph:

• Lighting not consistent: objects next to each other are illuminated to different degrees
• Shadows of objects are entirely missing (!)
• Furniture legs cast no shadow on the floor near their feet
• Objects (especially people) do not have depth
• People have zombie-like expressions
• People are all dressed very neatly
• People are the same height and no one’s overweight (!!)
• Plants are identical to the last leaf
• Objects are not scaled consistently: some pieces of furniture look out of proportion to others. Some of the people look out of proportion to one another and out of proportion to the ceiling height or furniture (use this to judge people’s heights: door openings are usually seven feet high)

Recognizing an Exterior Visualization

Any three of the following criteria prove that an image of the exterior of a building is a 3D visualization and NOT a photograph:

• Trees and plants are repetitive
• Lawns look like astro-turf… no loose leaves, no color or texture variation, no bald spots
• Objects next to each other are illuminated to different degrees (as in the case of interior renderings)
• People have zombie-like expressions and lack visual depth
• People are all dressed very neatly
• People are the same height and no one’s overweight (!!)
• There are not enough people in the scene (populating the scene greatly increases the time a computer takes to create the visualization)
• Objects (especially people) are out of proportion (use this to judge people’s heights: door openings are usually seven feet high)
• Trees in the foreground cast no shadows
• People cast no shadows
• Shadows of objects are cast in different directions or to in different proportions to their parent objects
• There are no blemishes on road asphalt or on sidewalks
• There are no loose leaves on the ground near trees
• The interiors of buildings are not visible through any windows (if the image is a close-up)
• Window panes appear painted

If you use the above criteria, you will never again mistake a computer-generated 3D visualization for a photograph!

To your image expertise,

Drafting services are subject to fluctuations in work inflow just like everyone else. The work inflow also fluctuates wildly, a situation that only some producers are subject to. TMG has its own way of dealing with this situation.

For starters, we maintain a constant slack in our in-house workforce to absorb moderate increases in client assignments. Whenever this slack is completely utilized, we resort to overtime. If we find that over time occurs too often, we decided that it’s time to augment our workforce.

We can augment our workforce in two ways: either add people in-house or set up off site contractors.

Adding people in-house entails advertising, interviewing and training. Adding off-site contractors involves the same steps, only we usually ask for external drafting services with specific experience, thus obviating the time and expense of training.

The off-site drafting services whom we identify as contractors are of course firms who have the necessary skill but are unable to project themselves into the international market. But India has a large number of such firms and finding them is only a matter of time.

The fact is that computer penetration in India is constantly increasing, and it is getting the point where having an office with in house staff is becoming less and less required. Reliable online contractors are becoming less of an option and more of a necessity for all drafting services active in the international marketplace.

This is just one of the several state-of-the-art methods that TMG employs to ensure a rapid, timely response to its valuable clients. Why not become a client?

The term “drafting services” encompasses several activities. Examples are 2D drafting, 3D drafting and 3D visualization. The subject of this article is 3D visualization, and some of the on-the-ground realities associated with it.

3D visualization is the creation of a computer-generated drawing which is remarkably lifelike, so lifelike that the viewer must wonder, “Is that a computer-generated drawing or a photograph?” 

The process of 3D visualization creation can be broadly divided into two steps: model creation and rendering.  

Model Creation

This entails creation in the computer’s memory of a 3D object that looks exactly like the target, real-world object. The 3D visualization expert uses one or more photographs of the object or perhaps 2D drawings of it as input information. Although the 3D visualization expert will inevitably have specialized drafting skills and spatial conceptualization ability of a high order,  he can take hours, days or months to create the object depending on how much detail is in it.

The completed model typically looks totally gray; also, there is no light falling on it and it therefore generates no shadows. The surface colors, lighting and shadows are created in the second step, i.e. rendering.   

Rendering

During this stage the 3D visualization expert specifies to the computer the surface finish of every part of the object as well as the intensity, color and position of the various lights that shine on the object. Examples of surface finishes (also called ‘textures’) would be “metallic red”, ‘beige linen” and “green moss”. Examples of lights would be “daylight”, “spotlight” and “directional light”. 

Once the computer has texture and lighting information, it pastes the specified surface finishes onto the appropriate surfaces and places lights of the specified intensity and color at the positions decided by the 3D visualization expert. It then draws light rays from every light source to its final destination.  A ray could travel from a spotlight to an object, then bounce off the object at the angle of reflection, hit another object, be reflected onto a third object, etc., losing intensity as it progresses along the path. When millions of light rays are drawn in this way, the result is a very realistic illumination of the object and its surrounds, complete with shadows and reflections (this is known as a ‘photorealistic rendering’). 

As one might imagine, the rendering process consumes enormous computing resources due to the very large number of light rays that have to be drawn. To render one scene consisting of a house surrounded by vegetation can often10 hours or more on the fastest desktop. If animation has to be created, which usually calls for 24 images per second, a 10-second animation would comprise 240 images, and the time taken to render these images on the computer would be 240 x 10 = 2400 hours = 100 days! Most probably by this time the client who wanted the animation would have lost faith in the 3D visualization expert and moved on to someone else who could do the job faster. 

Because of the long times taken for rendering, there was at one point a to drastically speed up the process. Software engineers found, in due course, a way of sharing the task of rendering between multiple computers. This concept did not imply that when 240 frames were required, each computer worked on a separate group of frames. It implied that even a single frame was worked on by the group of computers with a result that the rendering time for a single frame was less by orders of magnitude.

A group of computers that work together for rendering is known as a ‘render farm’.

It was often not feasible for drafting services to set up a render farm in their own office using five, 10 or more desktops. This constituted another need, one for rendering systems at low cost; and just as in the previous instance there was soon a solution: the online render farm.  

Online Render Farms

As you may have guessed, an online render farm is a render farm that can be accessed on a chargeable basis from any Internet terminal. Because it is online it can be used by more people than an offline farm, making it all the more commercially viable than an offline farm. 

But experience shows that it is not always a good 3D visualization solution. For the one part, it’s not as cheap as one would like it to be (experience leads one to believe it costs $1.50 per second of CPU time). 

Another fact is that although most online rendering render farms have online speed calculators which tell you that what takes your desktop 10 hours takes them only minutes, when you actually send them something to render you can be in for a jolt. You have to take your place in a processing queue and wait your turn, and it can often take more than one and a half hours before your turn comes! Whither the time savings? 

Conclusion

The motto of the story is not to think that an online render farm will solve all your computing resource problems as concerns 3D visualization. Apparently all the farms are overbooked at this time, and it will probably be some months before enough new farms come into being to reduce the average waiting time to a few minutes. 

The ideal solution would be to either have a special arrangement with an online rendering render farm for a maximum waiting time guarantee, or to render jobs on your own render farm (which of course might be subject to investment constraints, which will limit the amount of equipment and therefore the complexity of the 3-D visualization jobs you can render).

The important thing is to embrace the render farm concept and customize a solution that works for you based on the above suggestions. Be assured that such a solution is indeed out there!

May you render in peace,

It’s one of the the most innovative designs the world has ever seen. It’s the Helix Hotel, soon to be built in the Persian Gulf. It looks like a stack of irregularly shaped dinner plates; in reality it contains 208 rooms, an atrium and a waterfall.

The design was chosen from amongst many in a fierce competition. The winner was Thomas Leeser, an innovative architect who works from Germany and the United States. What motivated him to conceive of this unusual design? Why are there no windows visible on the outside? And what’s going on on the inside?

These are just some of the questions that I will be asking him when I interview him on our proprietary radio show, Engineering and Architecture Radio. The episode will be held on Friday, 17 April 2009 and promises to be an audio treat. Catch it here.

The episode will also be archived at the same URL, so that if you are not available to hear it live you can always listen to it later, and even download it into your desktop if you like.

Don’t miss the episode…sightseeing inside Thomas Leeser’s mind will be a rare experience!