After fully converting to Delphi XE2 some work has been put into finding some of the subborn bugs that seems to have appeared. With the help of a user I (hope) I've been able to resolve crashing when the software is running on virtual machines due to the software emulation of graphics cards. I've been running with the trial version of EurekaLog which has picked up a the crashes plus a number of memory leaks. In addition the following changes have been made:

• Colours are now imported and exported from DXF
• The IGES interface supports settings where the comma is used as a decimal separator
• When converting entities from one representation to another, the name and colour is retained.
• In the Macro editor, the text editor has reverted from a RichText Editor to a Memo text editor now that Windows allows files greater than 64kb to be editied, except on Win9x operating systems. But then I guess PolyCAD won't run on those systems any more.
• The Isophotes control on the Settings page has been updated with a manually implemented 'doublebuffer' so circumvent Windows Aero not retaining the control image. Basically, it now renders to a bitmap rather than the screen.
• The behaviour of the middle mouse button can now be defined on the settings page.

Progress has been slow in recent weeks due to work commitments and illness on returning from Texas. Last weekend I purchased the new version of Delphi (XE2) which seems to be a bit of big update. It will allow for a 64bit version of PolyCAD at some point as soon as I understand how to upgrade one of the algorithms that had been written in assembler which handles floating point to integer conversion. In the meantime I've needed to release an update to PolyCAD 9. This version has quite a lot of fixes. The biggest update is to the way BSpline curves and surfaces are evaluated. A new algorithm based on the NURBS book is now being used and is twice as fast as the old technique. However, there is a now chance of an infinite loop in cases where I haven't been too careful on the parameter range. Hopefully I have found all the cases that give rise to this. However, just in case the old version of PolyCAD 9 is still available.

I have a number of articles that have been written on various aspects of PolyCAD and have finally completed something that may eventually turn into a paper next year. The first article is on the new X-Topology Lofting entity that was released in PolyCAD 9 and also shows a preview of the X-Topology Surface/Fit entity that will be release in the next version.

An article on Form Topology has also followed.

I have also been experimenting with some video demos. The first demo is embedded the the former mentioned article but I also recorded this one on creating a simple yacht hull form using a single B-Spline surface. I have record the videos in 720HD so should produce a a reasonable clear picture when viewed in the highest resolution in full screen.

I must apologies to Olgierd Maslowski, from Lodz in Poland, for taking so long to put his images up on the website. Olgierd contacted me 18 months ago and provided some images of a prototype yacht, the Sylen 24, he developed with some friends as the beginning of a commercial line. However, the project never worked out.

Yachlines and Shiplines code has been updated to display parameters and contours propertly. For some reason the size information for these objects was not being pulled through properly and the surface generated by ShipLines was coming out with the U and V order = 0. Doh!

I have updated the scripting project. The X-Topology Hull Transformations developed of the last couple of years are almost completely exposed and is highlighting a few bugs, which is one of the intensions of the scripting tool. As of yet I have not documented the XTHullTransformation interface but there a number of new examples in the download. For a list of all the parameters available, the command "xt.parameters.list" can be used (assuming that the XTHullTransformation object had been named 'xt').

Since introducing Hull Transformation capability in PolyCAD 9, there really needs to be a proper scripting interface to some of the basic functions and geometry within the tool. The use of a scripting interface to manipulate hull geometry was one of the solutions considered as an modeling approach for X-Topology in respect of a parametric hull generation but this forces the user to have to learn and work with a script rather than a graphical user interface. However, the ability to systematically manipulate geometry using a sequence of commands has important in situations where optimisation techniques are being used.

Rather than develop a solution which purely provides hull transformation functionality, a complete scripting solution which exposes the curve and surface entities as well as providing variable, loops, flow control, file and arrays. However, PolyCAD already has an existing scripting tool and this means that until the new scripting tool provides the existing compartment generation capability it will be necessary to work with a separate applicaition which contains PolyCAD. Consequently, there is a lot of flexibility to experiment and investigate. Certainly, my own objectives are to use the scripting interface to systematically explore the capabilitys of the Form Topology bases hull transformations. Already the interface exposes the topological transformation points and regions which are not accessible in the graphical user interface.

I have made this scripting interface available on the downloads page so it can be tried out and new ideas explored. The download includes the software, a help file detailing most of the command interfaces developed so far, a number of examples covering:

• The loading of geometry files
• Management of entities,
• Creation of curves and surface
• Access to upright hydrostatic calculations
• Examples of hull form generation using Yachtlines, and ShipLines
• Hull transformation of BSpline Surfaces, BSpline Surface List and Section based representations
• Creation of X-Topology Surfaces
• Form Topology transformations of X-Topology Surfaces.

The project is on-going and I plan to upload new versions of the software as I extend it and update the help file. Give it a go and let me know how you get on...

Since releasing PolyCAD 9 I've been testing a few bits of pieces and introduced some improvements but I have also introduced a couple of new features some of which have been hanging around for many years but never completed. One of those items has been the development of more extended hydrostatic and stability calculations. That said, I never intend to take these very far because PolyCAD is the wrong platform for this kind of analysis and it really needs a separate application. However, I've now included a new option on the Calculations menu to perform free floating hydrostatics and calculate a GZ curve. Not something a professional would find adequate but something that might be interesting to someone learning about the concepts of stability. However, before illustrating that too, I have also introduced a more interactive way of extracting and extending edges of a surface.

Up to now, if you wanted to extract the edge of a BSpline Surface there was a option to extract all the edges of a surface as BSpline Curves. This meant that if you wanted to generate a deck surface from a BSpline Surface List, i.e. multiple patches, it was necessary to explode it, extract all the edges, and put the hull back together again. this was a bit tedious to say the least. I have now introduced two tools for assisting in this operation. The tool can be found on the BSpline Surface and BSpline Surface List entities, on the Right-Click menu, under extract edge and extend edge. The extract edge tool allow you to click on edges, or multiple edges using the Ctrl key. Edges can then be extracted as BSpline Curves or Polylines, which also has the option to weld them together. The Extend Edge tool, takes this concept further by projecting the BSpline Curve edges into a Surface. These surfaces are generated linearly either by picking up the surface edge tangency or along a specified direction. There is also an option to generate a surface across to a mirrored copy of the edge to generate a deck surface in one operations.

Up to now the hydrostatic analysis provided by the software has been primarily upright hydrostatics but I've had code that I've used to do basic stability operations for many years, primarily so that I can check out certain situtations or understand the results coming from another system. The Free Hydrostatics tool has two pages. The first page allows you to set up a free floating conditions. Weight can be specified using either Displacement or Draught. The floating attitude can be specified using either even keel or be specifying components of the centre of gravity. The free floating position is displayed graphically and there is a full output of the hydrostatic properties in this condition.

Once the initial condition is defined, the second page allows the calculation of the GZ curve in this condition. Once the curve is calculated, the floating position at each angle can be visualised by clicking on the GZ curve graph. There are a number of different options to display the hull form heeled, or the waterplane heeled. To show the positions of centres and draught marks and the display of the calculation and corresponding underwater sections.

Finally, a number of fixes have been made to the software. Significantly, X-Topology Surface should now export properly to ACIS and the Volumetric Hull Transformations have been improved to avoid getting stuck in a loop if the required condition could not be reached.

Finally, PolyCAD 9 has reached a stage where it can be released. It appears to have been a lot of work considering how much and when I developed a lot of the new features when putting together the release notes. I may not have fixed every bug in this release but it is now developed on a Windows 7 machine and the sofware has become pretty stable over the last 6 months to believe its ready to go.

Not all of the last three years developments are being released in this version. Notably the X-Topology Hull Transformations are missing because this element needs futher testing and without a scriptable interface to this feature it may not be possible to use the full power of this feature, particularly for optimisation. However, now that PolyCAD 9 has broken free into the public domain it will be much easier now to release updates.

Two recent introductions have been the development of a Seasafe and Napa interface. This has been done with some help from PolyCAD users who have access to these systems but as I don't I can only undertake a limited amount of testing. Certainly, for the Napa interface a lot of work has to be done from memory. I would be very grateful if any problems encounted using these interfaces could be feedback.

Finally, the help file has not been upgraded yet and I plan to do that soon.

Read more in the Release Notes.

Well, things have taken longer than expected. The new transformation tools have required a lot of thought and to support them there’s been a need for a lot of optimisation to improve the way that surfaces are rendered for visualisation, hydrostatics and analysis. In the last few weeks I’ve got to the stage where I’ve tested quite a lot of different hull forms and it’s now reasonably robust.

I never made it to COMPIT 2009 but after a significant push I completed enough research to support a paper at this year’s conference in Gubbio, Italy. It’s now available on the publications page.

M y laptop running XP has finally given up after five years. It’s done well really. I’ve just got a new one running Windows 7. There do seem to be a few odd problems running PolyCAD. The graphics are presently a bit untidy but it seems that this is down to a need to upgrade font used throughout the software. I still plan to get PolyCAD 9 out sometime, may be before Christmas this year. Although its always available on request.

Updates to PolyCAD have been fairly infrequent this year. One of the many reasons for this is that the software has become fairly mature in terms of its modelling capability and has not required any significant changes to its current line up functions. Another reason is that a year ago I changed my day job and I am learning to use new ship design tools.

Development of PolyCAD 9 has been underway for some time and introduces a number of powerful modelling features which function along side existing tools. However, as many of these tools are aimed at expert users, such as a NURBS knot editor, there is currently no real need to release it yet because for most people PolyCAD 8 is just as good.

That said, PolyCAD 9 features import/export interfaces to the Tribon Britfair and ACIS (SAT) file formats which may be useful for Tribon users as the presently the only realistic alternative to getting surface data in TID Surface/Compartment is Rhino. Furthermore, Rhino is not able to import SAT files. Although these interfaces are complete, significant changes are planned to the SAT interface in the future (another reason why the release of version 9 is on hold). However, if you are interested in the Tribon interfacing capability please feel free to get in touch and request a pre-release of PolyCAD 9.

One of the main reasons why PolyCAD 9 is on hold is due to the development of a innovative hull surface transformation tool based on the ideas of hull form topology (See IntelliHull publications). The idea is to use the underlying topological structure of the shape of the hull form (boundaries, knuckles, flats) to construct a framework which can be used to deform the surface. This framework should capable of modifying the surface at the global and regional levels. Presently techniques only allow changes at the global and control point (definition) level of the hull surface. This research is speculative and there is a good chance that it may not work but its interesting. There are plans to put a paper together to present the work so far at Compit 2009 Conference in Budapest.

Since the release of PolyCAD 8 and X-Topology earlier this year there has been a lot of work to try to improve the new hull/surface design tools and other features of the software which interact with them. The X-Topology surface routines primarily interpret user data to produce a smooth surface and, as this data is humanly generated, there has been lots of work to try to make sure that the software can handle a wide range of different curve network configurations or fail gracefully when the data is inappropriate. This work is ongoing but it is now time to make an update to the version on the website.

There are a number of new features including a 3D measuring/dimension entity and more extensive polygon mesh editing code. Furthermore, the create mode is now retained when interactively drawing new geometry. This will probably surprise a few existing users when they experience it for the first time.

Work on X-Topology is ongoing to both improve the existing interactive surface design tools and to develop a set of topology based parametric/interactive hull/surface transformation tools.

Following the release of the new rules for the next America's Cup, Jean-Marc Nourry has announced his design expertise for the new hull form. Jean-Marc has been developing a parametric hull generation tool to produce optimised hull forms for a number of years and uses PolyCAD as part of his design process. Some of Jean-Marc's designs can be found in the user show case.

Press releases:
2007-10 VITEO Contact Presse
2007-11-06 VITEO Contact Presse

jean-marc.nourry@viteo.fr

The X-Topology surface design tools in PolyCAD were presented at the Hull and Surface Design Workshop held at GRC. A select number of delagates were draw from the UK naval ship building and consultancy industry. They felt that PolyCAD's surface design tools were one of the most advanced they'd every experienced. This feedback is quite fantastic especially as they were all experience naval architects and only had couple of hours with the software and minimal training. Find more information on the Photo Blog page...

An updated version of PolyCAD 8 has been uploaded to coincide with the workshop feature improved surface continuity characteristics in X-Topology Surfaces.

After three years development PolyCAD 8 has finally reached the stage where it can be released on the website, at least as a full test version. There has been some significant work on the user interface:

For the last five years I've been working on extending the IntelliHull concept to multi-patch surfaces. As expected, understanding how to address surface topology became the major bottleneck, eventually taking three years to resolve. This could not have been achieved without the help of Herbert Koelman from SARC who developed the Fairway system. Last november I the surface generation code started to behave robustly and after a few more months of software development and help/tutorial documentation, X-Topology curves and surfaces are ready for an initial test release. There is still much to work on, with the next stage being the development of hull transformation driven by IntelliHull type parameters.