FREE!ship 2.0 released

Address posted in Design Software forum.

http://www.boatdesign.net/forums/showthread.php?p=61233#post61233

Steve

 

Tutorial

Is the tutorial different than the manual?

 

Yes, the manual tells you what the functions do, the tutorial will (should?) run you thru the creation of a hull from scratch, step by step. The tutorial is being written by someone else, other than the author of the software. Stephan is currently adding in uses of the added features in 2.0

Steve

 

Is there a Mac version or solely Windows?

 

Windows only I think.

Steve

 

I've been playing with it (the software) a little bit and have created a couple of test hulls.

Do you do your hull design with FREEShip or do you utilize a hull design package and import it into FREEShip?

I've been experimenting with exporting to Rhino and (dare I even say it) Turbocad. The .DXF polylines will loft in Rhino, but the face .DXF seem to be useless except for a quick and dirty render of the hull. If you are using FREEShip to create hulls, what is you method of getting them in a CAD package?

Looks like a great utility package, especially for the price.

 

Use Freeship to design you hull, and then follow this:

1-Use the Curve command on Freeship to create the "edges" chines, sheer, fairbody, etc.. of your hull

2-Export to Rhino as DXF 3D Polyline

3-In Rhino use "Rebuild" and convert the polylines to splines, using X number of control points, just enough to follow the original polyline, this needs a little bit of try outs until you have a spline that uses the least number of control points, and follows the best the original polyline.

4-Then use the curvature command to analyze the curve and if required move the points around until you get a "fair" curve, probably it won't need that much post processing.

5-use the loft command to create the surfaces.

It will be close enough to the freeship model.

Second option:

I'm not quite if this can be done now, export the coordinates of the vertexes that controls the surface of the hull on freeship, put them on a txt file that rhino can read to create the points, and use "control point curve" to draw the spline, then loft to create surfaces.

Expect some differences but the lines will be really close enough.

 

You guys are already beyond me...I'm still at 'dick see jane and ...... I'm waiting for the tutorial. I use Carene right now. It does simple lines and free ship can import them and give me a 3d of it, so I can rotate it. It also gives picture of the panels better than carene. I do most of my drawing in Paint from screen captures. Wood spear and flint axe type stuff .

Steve

 

While we're on the file conversion thing....
Is there a convenient way to move a model from Rhino to FreeShip and vice-versa? VRML would seem the logical choice but Rhino seems unable to create a VRML file that FreeShip can read. Anybody know what works, or do we wait for FreeShip 2.3, which is rumoured to support IGES?

 

I found this on the forum http://www.freeship.org/

Export coordinates from Free!ship
Import Point file (.txt) in Rhino
Use SrfControlPtGrid command in Rhino to create surface

hope this makes sense to you.

Steve

 

Thanks Steve, that clears up the FS->Rhino part.
Does anyone know what formats work for moving from Rhino to Freeship?

 

I've had perfect success exporting files from FREEship as DXF files, which are easily and accuractely opened by Rhino. But I don't know of a way to go the other direction. I would also like to know about it if there is a way.

 

Did a bit of playing around with this pair this week, using a fairly generic slender monohull.... some interesting results.
- Exporting a FreeShip hull by points file as per post #10: Surprisingly, this yielded approx. 10-12% reduction in hull volume compared to the Freeship hydrostatic calculations. (Rhino and Freeship don't generate the same surface from the same control points.)
- Exporting from Freeship as WaveFront (.obj) or faces (.dxf): This yielded a mesh hull in Rhino (identical for either), then MeshToNurb was used to generate a hull. Result was about 4% lower in volume than the Freeship hull.
- Exporting sections, waterlines and/or buttocks as DXF, then lofting in Rhino: While the hull looked pretty close, there was obvious distortion and incorrect gaussian curvature along keel and stem that changing the loft options couldn't resolve.
I don't consider any of these methods to be really satisfactory. For now I'm using DXF or OBJ meshes and MeshToNurb, but the resulting file is just huge. *hopes for IGES support to arrive*......