Boat Hulls and File Conversion
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Two for the price of one.
At CarlsonDesign there are quite a few freebies near the bottom of the page dealing with cutting designs for sails and awnings etc. There is also a very neat Hull Designer.I don't know about the others, but the Hull Designer will output to VRML. I have attached a simple, unsmoothed example. When brought into SU I find that the faces all have at least two skins, often more. The quickest way of dealing with this is simply to go to Wireframe, hide the edges, switch back to Textured, select all the faces and delete them, then finally unhide the edges again. You can then run Todd's Makefaces.rb, or various other means to skin the model.
The second goody is also attached. This is useful for all of you that are a bit lacking in the file conversion department. It's a small program called Crossroads. I have taken the liberty of uploading here because it is a piece of abandoned freeware. The original site has disappeared and the links to a working copy grow scarcer every month. Development on it ceased about 10 years ago, but it still has it's uses to convert between a wide range of common 3D formats. I used it (even though I didn't need to) to get the VRML boat hull into SU, by converting it first to 3ds.
Both these programs are PC only.
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I should add that both of these programs have basic installs. Hull Designer can simply have the program zip file extracted within a new folder and run directly from there.
Crossroads does install to its own folder in Program Files, but that too is self-contained and can be moved anywhere.
Both can therefore be uninstalled by simply deleting the folder.
Crossroads supported formats:
Reads: 3DS, DXF, POVRay V2.2, RAW, Truespace COB, VRML 1, OBJ, NFF.
Writes: 3DS, 3DMF (ASCII & Binary...T3D & B3D), Povray V2.2 & V3, RAW, Truespace COB, VRML V1 & V2, OBJ, NFF -
Gregg Carlson's Hulls application is definitely a good one. I've been using it for 5 or 6 years. I used it to design the cradle boat I built for my son. I think I've shown it elsewhere so I won't bore you all with it now.
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