Seeking Software Recommendations

[CET]

Greetings to everyone. I am new to the forum and wanted to say hello, and ask for some advice. I have been reading the forum for several weeks and have enjoyed all the great information available here.

I’ve never built a boat but plan to begin a project shortly. I own a Hyde drift boat that I use to float and fly fish Western US rivers. I have wanted to build one for many years but haven’t had the time before now, which is why I bought the Hyde several years ago. But now I would like to build one and have spent a lot of time thinking about and planning the hull design. I downloaded the free software ‘FreeShip’ and have been playing with it. It’s very impressive and easy to use, but there is one thing I would like the capability to do, and I don’t believe FreeShip has that capability. I would like to be able to take the panel dimensions, etc., from an existing boat and plug them into a software program to exactly duplicate the hull design of that boat so I can then tweak it to my needs. As far as I can tell, FreeShip creates the panel dimensions from a hull the user designs with the software, but does not allow one to go the other way…that is, begin with the panel measurements and then use them to create the hull design.

Am I missing something in the FreeShip software? If not, can anyone recommend another program (preferably a free one, or at least an inexpensive one) that allows the user to do what I have described above?

Thanks in advance for any information.

Charles

PS - In case anyone is not familiar with drift boats, they are very simple single chine boats that are fully developable using plywood panels (or aluminum). Thanks again.

[CGN]

Hello CET,

So far there is no software where you can take a set of offsets, input these, and have a full nice surface 100% as the offset, why?, because the way most of the software's work, even a set of offsets can be incomplete, this question has been asked over and over, but, is not impossible and there is ways that involved some work and some tweaks here and there, and that requires a little bit of experience by the user so basically you need to learn the software to be able to achieved what you are looking for, IMO you can try Rhino 3D and TouchCAD 3D, on these software's it will be easier for you to create sections based on the offset table that you have and loft trough these sections to create your hull surfaces.

have a look at this simple examples:

http://www.3drender.com/rhino/boathtml/index.htm


Good luck!

[CET]

Thanks for your response, CGN. It appears I may have resurrected a dead horse. If so, I apologize. I did a search but didn’t turn up anything that answered my question, but being a complete novice at boat building and software I didn’t really know what to search on and my search was probably not very effective. I will play with the FREEship software a little more and see if I can figure it out. Thanks again!

[CGN]

That's ok there is always new members and this question is been asked a lot, please feel free to ask the forum is really good and we would be glad to help.

If you have a picture of the boat post it here and i'll be glad to do some demo on freeship so it can help you

welcome!

[lewisboats]

I once edited the offset file for Hulls and reproduced a design that I had done in a different program. If the hull is developable for plywood, you can probably look at the offsets for an example boat, see what you need, then do up a batch of measurements and plug the numbers in and tweak from there. As Hulls is free, it is worth a try, and also worth what you pay for.

Here's the link for the software.
http://www.carlsondesign.com/#Fun_Shareware

Steve

[Gilbert]

Hi CET,
By far the easiest thing for you to do is take measurements from your existing boat and use them to make a model in freeship that is very accurate. Then you can tweak it in freehip any way you like.
In other words forget about the panel dimensions and measure the actual boat.
This should be a piece of cake compared to trying to do it with the panel dimensions.

Best Wishes,
Gilbert

[CET]

Gilbert, I had come to the same conclusion. I e-mailed Martijn and he showed me how to import the coordinates from my boat measurements. He was very helpful. That's the route I'm goint to take.

Thanks again to everyone who responded.

[myk]

Hi CET. I was wondering if you might post the info you got from Marijn? It would be appreciated. Cheers.

[atahawaii]

CET you can try Hullform, the student version is free. You can download if from www.hullform.com. One of the program samples involves putting in offsets from an existing design if I remember correctly. After you input the offsets you might want to tweak them a little with built in fairing tools within the program.