Need advice for complex shading scene

[Helioworks]

I have a multi-orientation PV system on a very curvy hillside, and I am struggling to model it successfully.

Using the automatic altitude tool, I end up with 60+ orientations which is obviously too many to reasonably distribute the strings across (and obviously the software only allows 8 anyway). Is there any best practice or easy method to overcome this? Or would I need to manually adjust the different groups of tables into just 8 pitch/azimuth combinations, and position them manually?

Any help/advice would be greatly appreciated. Please see screenshots attached.

[Michele Oliosi]

Hi,

In the 3D scene, Tools > Orientation management tool, you will find a tool that will help you reduce the number of orientations. There are several ways to proceed, either semi-manually, or by changing the tolerance to identify different orientations.

If you double click on an orientation, you can assign tables to it. In the above example all tables have been assigned to orientation #1, so you should first unassign them before assigning them to another orientation group.

[JohnZVS]

I had the same problem and I solved it by increasing the tolerance to identify only one orientation, as Michele Oliosi suggested above. 

The remaining question is, does this impact the accuracy of the simulation? 

[Michele Oliosi]

Yes, it technically is less accurate to modeling things with one orientation instead of having all orientations of your tables. But unless the RMS of the differences between planes is extreme (e.g. 20°) there should not be a huge impact.