Paper plans to computer-plotted?

[JEM]

How bigis the paper? I'd take it to Kinkos (copying business in the U.S.) or other place and try copying it. If the hull is rounded, any wrinkles or folds should easily be identified as not your hull form.

How about tracing paper? Any minor waviness (sp?) from being hand drawn won't translate to any significant bumps. If you're hand cutting and not using CNC, then you'll have minor waviness that has to be sanded out anyway.

[farjoe]

Has anybody tried a program called ScanPro for converting scanned drawings in CAD files? Is it any good?

regards

[jameshogan]

I took my plans to kinkos once for copying. They are not so nice looking. I was able to get the jpeg of the plans into Rhino, but was not able to figure out how to do anything else. I see all these cool images built by Rhino, but so far I am not able to figure out how.

I havent been able to figure if Rhino does any stability calcs or not. Anyone know.??

[Tim B]

the big advantage of digitising the plans is that you can do it on any surface... if you have a large drawing board, then you should be able to get the plans pretty much crease-free. anyway... Rhino and maxsurf.

Once you place a background bitmap then you can start tracing hull-lines off it. This will take a while. with the lines traced you can then fair them and then use the surfacing tools to build you're surfaces. once you know where the surface is you can take out as much hydrostatic data as you want. I beleive (though I haven't used it) Maxsurf will let you do this within the software. Using Rhino I suggest you take the hull definition (save it as raw traingles) then write yourself a bit of code to integrate the volume of each triangular prism (extruded triangle) at a certain condition. re-run this at different conditions to obtain the full hydrostatics.

You will find that you can adjust the triangle mesh to give quite accurate results.

Cheers,

Tim B.