Hull Design baby steps (skp attached)

RootlessAgrarian

For anyone who is interested...

here's my first attempt at documenting what I think is the easiest/simplest (though least accurate) approach to building a virtual boat hull (at least to the first stage -- more to come) with SU7. It's fairly similar to other folks' methods that I've found online -- but to my brain, a little clearer.

I am a rank newbie so am probably doing some things stupidly, feel free to laugh. Just trying to give something back in gratitude for the hospitality w/which I've been met as a n00b. Thanks to everyone.

I found that it was easier drawing bezier curves on a defined surface, then rotating and warping the whole surface (for better visibility, less parallax error and other confusions). There is some cleanup (extreme zoom needed -- stray line deletion and very fine point position adjustments) to make them into clean connected curves that Soap/Skin will accept. I guess I should list the plugins I used... off top of head, ummm, Shape Bender, Soap/Skin, TextTag. I forget whether Bezier Curves is a plugin or a native feature in v7

My next attempt will be skinning carefully shaped frames along a curve. This seems far more time consuming and tricky, but should yield a more controllable, potentially accurate shape.

Virtual Boat Yard 1

Gaieus

Yes, I am interested.

So far, so good. Note however (when hidden geometry is on), that some parts are made of rather much geometry which won't help keeping the model clean. Especially near the bow (where also there is a little bend-in in the mesh).

Some suggestions also:

After you make the mesh with SSB, convert the group into a component (right click the group > Make component)
After mirroring, do not explode the two parts. When they are instances of the same component definition, you will only need to work on one half at a tzime and all the changes will be reflected on the other half (not to mention savings in file size).
There are some inaccuracies in the modelling process somewhere. An example; here the two halves do not perfectly align. You can easily move them together at this point but when I placed the deck on top of the hull, I noticed other misalignments, too.
When dealing with such geometry, always double check these little details othewise you can easily end up with some troublesome things later.

All in all, very nice for "baby steps" and I can already see where you are going (although the horizon of a baby is still somewhat smaller) so feel encouraged to learn to run, too.