I groused and lamented too much on it over the past 3 years. Apologies.

I complained because I wanted Tim to make meshes work better for ME, by making meshes into a surface in one fell swoop. I did not allow myself to more carefully explore the tools, homing in on areas ofminterest to the detriment of better productivity.

Just this past week, I decided to dispense with the stations imported from Freeship, and, instead, use the meshes for creating sideshell.

I increased the mesh precision, exported the dxf mesh model from Freeship, and then imported to VCP.

I then put VCP in wireframe view mode so I could see the vertices. I was so blinded by the visual appearance of solid models that I worked continuously in that mode, causing myself to forget that wirefram ismeasier to deal with meshes.

I then changed the meshes to meshes, and as much as possible, avoided turning them to further decompositions. Turning them to curves pretty much resulted consistently in getting off-angle facets I did not like seeing . In the past, I doggedly pursued turning those into surfaces, then to thickened solids, causing ACIS to croak reliably.

In VCP, Icreated management layers to hide away meshes not relevant to my hull-surfacing and fairing tasks.

Using the one of the spline tools, I traced vertically at each vertex to make my watertight compartments. I traced horizontally to make controls for the path of the breadth of the hull. Horizontal traces hit vertices of importance. BUTTTT, i made sure to pre-map my horizontal paths to as much as possible stay at the same elevation above baseline to minimize curvature transitions in the hull.

I then used the guide surface tool to case-by-case select surface curves and guide curves. In my model IT DOES MATTER which way I select first. In some cases, the surface did not follow one of the horizontals I selected. Sometimes, the surface finished with a gap, causing me to use the surface match tool. In most cases, things went very well.

The trickiest part is where my Freeship-originating sonar bulb bow has a small patch of meshing. I compromised more than I preferred, but, it still came out much better than I was obtaining via use of stations only.

Remarkably, and lamentably, I was staring at my opportunistic solution in December and January when playing with PolyCAD. In PolyCAD,Ii spent weeks exploring and attaching surfaces to various line types, hoping I would ultimately import a shiny, faired bow into VCP. But, it did not go as planned, as the model would not back port correctly into Freeship for further hydros evals. Still, PolyCAD is a great tool, and if I won a Powerball, I would sweeten the pot to get Ti, Marcus, and Victor in the same room to merge their products and endow them with the best prior-art or obvious ansd non-proprietary features such as push-pull, hydros reporting, frames-making, and other things. I guess, I am envisioning a VCP-Freeship-PolyCAD tool combo for those who cannot afford te $8,000 - $80,000 per-seat nautical tools. And, I would try to make an open source version of ASSET, LEAPS, and others, from around the world, made for hobbyists but strong enough for industrial pros, too. Anyway...

Now, despite two experimental approaches spanning 2.5 days this week, I now will only use the hull-area stations as curves for projection web frame stations and optionally embedding those onto the shell plating surface. I used to insist on importing the .dxf polylines, converting them to splines, and then building surfaces between them, as if partially doing a plating cutting plan (plan, not plane), too. That resulted in my noticing lack of good fairing, more time in Delftship (in the past, Delftship), and Freeship, more disappointment in my techniques, and more exploration of more of VCP's tools. So, I have a 15 compartment hull that looks much better by guided surfaces than by ordinary surfaces. Nex time around, I will make in Freeship a bow that has better fairing that avoids creation of tight patching. Still, I feel much happier about things, but regret that I mentally lapsed almost a year ago when I was so close to finding the solution I wanted.

Now, I build off center a line for each station, then project those back to the hull, keeping the parent lines and ignoring the original stations of the hull thereafter. I previously wasted a lot of time inserting into Freeship an ever-increasing number of stations at the bow, attempting to bridge the surfacing gaps. That led to bizarre, uncorrectable twists, swords, and rifts that were not usable.

This week, I also created my first decent-looking propeller, spending maybe 20 hours over 2 days. And, I made very pleasing use of the Gripper to align my propeller shafts in VCP to the imported mesh path of my propellers and shafts. Not perfect, but by eye-hand coordination, it is "close enough for government work" I feel.

The best payoff is that these surfaces a so superior in smoothness and lighting, it results in a more responsive pan and sweep response. I think that the fewer knots or kinks in the underlying surfaces, the easier it is on the GPU and CPU. I will find out more as I recreat stringers, girders, web frames, and more structure in the hull.

Oh, another HUGE payoff is that, because the compartments' sideshells now are one piece lenthgwise vs up to 6, it is possible to use the Project Curve to Surface as Tim intended. Now, I can change deck plating elevations and retain associativity to the hull-deck interface, AND avoid the trimming of material that in the past would be geometry outside the hull. Until better ways come to mind, I do not want to use a two-piece, half-breadth approach. I is not just about being able to spatially manipulate and edit the model geometey. It is more about weight management and accounting in my model first, the other aspects a close second. I want to know the weight of an isolated compartment, and it certainly helps to get huge chunks of the model out of RAM, not just obscured by clipping or other visual planes. So, in this regard, iIam compromising on visual hull fairness. Besides, as with the stations in the past in my drawings, the creases add to the effect of seams or plate welding issues.

Used correctly, with deeper/deepening understanding of the tools, I can make more use of VCP in the coming months than I did since 2008.

So, again, apologies to Tim and Team.