Modelling in Maxsurf with existing lines plan

[squivo]

Can anybody help me, how can I properly use my existing lines plan to create a model in Maxsurf? I have both the Prefit and Maxsurf pro avaiable for my personal use.
I've being reading some old posts about this subject and I tried to access a tutorial made avaiable by Andrew, but I couldn't get access to it. I would be very thankful for any help. If any of you have this tutorial, please email it to me.(If I'm not wrong it's called Maxsurf Tutorial 5)

[fastfish666]

What is required depends a lot on what you have to start with. If you have an IGES NURB surface model, you can load that into most modellers.
If you have a digital linesplan, eg polylines of sections waterlines and buttocks in DXF format, then you will need to create a NURB surface model that fits those data. Same goes if you have a table of offsets -- but you will first have to enter the data into the modeller. There is no quick way of doing this really, and the best method depends on the required result. If you are simply going to do hydrostatic analysis or seakeeping, then you dont really need a super fair hull -- you only need this if you are going to build the vessel. If the hull doesnt need to be very fair there are shortcuts you can use (use more control points in the surface) to get a quicker fit to you section data. A very good article which covers this subject in some detail has been written by Bruce Hays of FastShip:
www.proteusengineering.com/files/surfacefitting.pdf

For maxsurf specific information, there is a section on the manual -- if you dont have the latest manual they are online:
http://www.formsys.com/extras/FDS/webhelp/maxsurf/msmanual.htm
Look for the section: 'Fitting Surfaces to Existing Designs'

For anything but the simplest design, you are probably going to need several surfaces so it is also a question of figuring out the best surface topology for the design

cheers