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.