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PolyCAD brings together the best selection of hull surface design techniques together within a user interface which allows the extensive manipulation of geometry in 3D dimensions. The software supports the direct manipulation of NURBS surfaces, parametric hull generation and advanced techniques such as IntelliHull and X-Topology.

The user interface is a unique environment where geometry can be manipulated accurately while viewing in three dimensions including perspective. Definition geometry can be selectively snapped to other geometry in the workspace. Hull surfaces can be rendered, analysed using gaussian and mean curvature and reflection lines, and hydrostatic properties reviewed. Once a design is complete, a fully annotated lines plan drawing of the hull surface can be generated or hard copy templates printed, to scale, to aid physical modelling.

Manipulation of hull section data is rarely supported in modern hull design tools. PolyCAD incorporates a range of powerful polyline processing functions which allow the distribution of points and section curves to be adjusted, reducing complexity so that the data can be used for hydrodyamic analysis. For the expert designer, the native text file format can be used to overlay flow lines and pressure data from CFD analysis onto the hull surface.

Introducing PolyCAD 9.0:

The 9th version release of PolyCAD brings together several long term developments which were created to support the hull form transformation process. The primary focus has been the development of hull form transformation tools for X-Topology surfaces using the techniques explored in IntelliHull. This development required a thorough review of the way surfaces are handled and the introduction of new realisation code to manage all information extracted from surfaces. While the hull transformation functions developed for X-Topology surfaces are omitted in this first release of version 9 to allow for further testing, the transformation process has been reviewed and the basic translate, rotate, scale and mirror operations have been completely rewritten to support interactive changes and, in the case of the translate and rotate operations, geometric arraying is now available. Furthermore, hull form transformations for B-Spline surfaces, sections and polygonal hull surface representations have been introduced.

While the user interface has been upgraded to remove graphical issues that appeared in previous versions when running on Vista/Windows 7, as little as possible has been done to change the way that it appears or operated. That said, a number of new Operations have been introduced which reuse the entity properties area of the screen. These Operations are used to provide additional options when creating or modifying geometry.

Finally, a number of new file interfaces have been introduced covering Tribon/AVEVA Marine, Seasafe and Napa data formats.