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.