Freeship help for a novice

Hi Everyone, I would like to design a 20 ft power cat for fishing purposes and have been having a go using the Freeship software. Unfortunately I have had no training with this software besides many hours of failed attempts at getting this twin hull shape to work.

I have read up on some of the previous topicst and some suggest drawing one half/side of the hull or pontoon and then mirroring it and joining it together by extrusion. Realistically I don't have any idea on how to do that but furthermore, does mirroring give you a duplicate or the opposite? My question...can you draw up a twin hull design on the program in it's entirety without carrying out the process above?

If so, how would you go about creating the tunnel and 2 keels?

I really would appreciate some assistance with this and I apologise in advance for the very inexperienced question.

 

Hi Ryan,

Freeship isn't that difficult to learn. I learned it by trial, error and reading the manual. Entering a twin hull design doesn't add much information compared to entering only one hull. That also applies to the tunnels and keels as they stay above the waterline. Freeship is mainly for hydrostatic calculations, if you want to make a drawing of your boat best use an other tool. Pay attention however that import-export formats in Freeship are limited.

Besides that: designing a boat takes much much more than just a drawing.

 

Hi Ryan

I have recently started work on a design on a 5.8m alloy power cat using Freeship. It is possible.
I tried 2 methods and the design a single pontoon half and then mirror is in the end the easiest and most successful.
Happy to help you step through it.
Basics
1) create the outer half of your pontoon.
2) go into "transform tab" and click on mirror.
3) set the distance between the centre line of each pontoon.



It is not perfect, as you can see in the body plan.
The issues I trying to resolve now is exporting the #D polylines so I can work on detailing the bulkheads.
Cheers
Tim