New Features: Groups / Duplication / Equipment Names / Mouse Controls

[mcondor]

Hi everyone, we have a big update for the end of September!

First off, we have updated the mouse controls to be more explicit and intentional.
You now need to choose the specific action for your primary (left) mouse button for rotating and panning the camera. The default mouse action is 'select', much how it has always worked: point and click to select equipment and drag to move equipment. However, in order to rotate or pan the camera, you need to one of two things. The first and main way is to select the appropriate action from the toolbar and use the primary mouse button to rotate or pan. The other way is to use the secondary (right) mouse button to rotate the camera and the wheel click to pan. These changes allow you to be more precise with equipment selection without accidentally rotating or moving the camera.

Next up, equipment grouping and ungrouping. After multi-selecting equipment (using the Control or Command key), you can now use the group action in the tool bar to group equipment together. The equipment in the group can then be selected, positioned, and edited all together. Grouped equipment can similarly be ungrouped using the ungroup action in the tool bar.

Groups are great, but not the end of the story. ITA CFD now supports duplicating single pieces of equipment, multiple pieces of equipment, as well as groups of equipment. (Finally!) It functions similarly to how the single piece of equipment deuplication worked before. Select the equipment and/or group you want to duplicate, select the duplicate action from the tool bar, and stamp out as many copies as you want.

Imagine that you have a row of racks that you just duplicated, on your way to designing a hot aisle data center. However, your row of racks are facing the wrong way. Instead of rotating about the corner 90º at a time (which is still valid and necessary feature), you can now also rotate 180º about the centroid, allowing you to reorient the row of racks without having to reposition them as well.

You have just modeled a whole data center more efficiently than ever, but how do you keep track of what equipment is what? Now you can name individual equipment as well as groups.

As developers and users of ITA CFD, we are enthusiastic about being able to bring these often requested features to all of the ITA CFD users. Feedback, questions, bug reports, are all welcome and much appreciated. 

What is coming up next in Q4?

- Support for 800mm racks
- CVS style report for model and analysis data
- and more!