Align & repair surfaces

Surface normals (Align)

Every surface has a normal direction that determines which side of the construction faces outward — incorrectly oriented surfaces lead to swapped component sides and faulty solar loads. To check them, View > Show surface normals displays the normal vectors in the scene.

Invoking

Toolbar mode Align (Building workspace only). The panel shows the Surface normal direction group:

• Flip — reverses the normals of all selected surfaces (its own undo step “Surface normal flipped”). Use it to selectively correct individual, incorrectly oriented surfaces.
• Automatic detection — checks all room surfaces in the project via ray tracing: from each surface’s midpoint a ray is cast in the normal direction, counting how often it intersects other surfaces of the same room. If the intersection count is odd, the normal points inward and is flipped. The correction applies project-wide and is recorded as a single undo step.

Edit a single surface (Edit mode)

Invoking

Toolbar mode Edit (tooltip “Edit the geometry of a single surface”, Building workspace only). On activation the selection is cleared and a Geometry type color legend is displayed that colors all objects:

• Simple room (floor polygon) — rooms stored as a floor polygon + extrusion height
• Complex surface — freely editable individual surfaces

Then click the surface you want to edit. With nothing selected, the panel shows “No single surface selected”.

Editing surface vertices

For a complex surface, the Geometry editing panel shows the Surface vertices table (#, X, Y, Z). Points can be

• dragged directly in the scene (vertex drag with snapping),
• edited numerically in the table,
• duplicated in the scene to insert additional vertices.

Apply commits the change (“Surface geometry changed”), Cancel discards it; when leaving with unsaved changes the program asks “You have unsaved point changes. Discard?”. Invalid (degenerate or self-intersecting) polygons are rejected. If moving a point makes a surface non-planar, the program automatically splits it into planar sub-surfaces (message “Surface split due to non-planar change”).

Simple room: floor polygon and room height

If the clicked object is a simple room, its floor polygon is edited (display “Simple room: … (floor polygon)”). The hint text explains the behavior: “Simple room: edit floor polygon points and extrusion height. Walls and ceiling are regenerated automatically.”

• Field Room height [m]: — extrusion height; minimum value 0.1 m (otherwise message “The room height must be at least 0.1 m.”).
• After Apply, walls and ceiling are regenerated from the modified floor polygon. Windows whose wall is removed or that the wall no longer contains are deleted — with a warning (”… sub-surface(s) were removed …”).

Convert to complex

Convert to complex breaks the “floor polygon + height” coupling and makes all surfaces of the room individually editable (undo step “Convert room … to complex geometry”). Conversion is required before simple rooms can be scaled, trimmed, or cut — Transformations and Trim also offer the conversion where needed. There is no reverse conversion (other than undo).

Related topics

• Move, Rotate & Scale
• Trim, Cut & Copy
• Construction check