Steve S.

Plasticity does have a FREE plug-in that works with Blender. Edits made in Plasticity update in realtime in Blender. So change a nurbs in Plasticity and watch the mesh change instantly in Blender.

@EAlexander Thanks for the compliment. I do appreciate it. Plasticity and Vectorworks both use the same geometry modeling kernel. Exporting out of Plasticity as a Parasolid XT file and then importing into Vectorworks works great The model comes into VW as a generic solid. I haven't spent much time that I can remember tweaking an imported XT model. But I’ve attached the VW file of the imported XT so have a go at it. I would think that you should be able to modify it as much as any other generic solid. The imports do appear to come into VW with a fair amount of iso lines (I guess that’s what they are). The pictures here in this post show the main curves I used in Plasticity for using XNurbs to make one side of the boat. So you can see that there was not a whole lot of line work to make a SHEET that was mirrored. Then the nose was made with XNurbs. The back end was patched to make a solid of the 4 sheets. I then used a polyline to do a cut to make the rear deck. For the rounds where the flat deck meets the sides, I did a surfacing technique. I've purchased Rhino about five weeks ago. And that program is going to have a place in my repertoire of CAD programs. Especially if Vectorworks gets to the point where I no longer want to pay what they are charging for Select Service At that point, Rhino will become my architectural CAD modeler. Not as fast as Vectorworks but for the type of work I do, it will get the job done. And for those that are interested, the drafting tools are getting better. As far as a modeling program for doing shapes that are more than rectangles and flat surfaces, Plasticity is the way to go as far as I'm concerned. Once you start getting up to speed and learning how to use the tools, you will appreciate the efficiency of that program and the power of it. On first glimpse, Plasticity doesn't look like much. But that is extremely deceiving. The toolset is powerful and fast. Boat made in Plasticity.vwx

DB mentioned how a model will be printed. DB also mentioned racing models. I would assume DB is looking for SMOOTH. If anyone wants to learn how to make smooth objects, they should spend time learning a surface modeling program. They should spend time in a good forum about surface modeling. This will greatly help them even if their goal is to end up using Vectorworks to make something like a boat Without doing so ——— well ——— this is Virtuals model brought into Plasticity and with Zebra stripes applied. So for those that don’t know what Zebra is about — the wavy lines indicate that this is far from smooth. You don’t want to print this type of model unless you are prepared to use a lot of filler and do a lot of sanding.

@DB_yachts @Jeff Prince suggested that there are other programs better suited for doing such as a boat hull. I could not agree more with what Jeff said. These other programs for one thing, may specialize in making objects very smooth. I used such a program to make what you see in the pictures in this post. If you look at the ZEBRA STRIPES, notice how there are NO RIPPLES in the stripes. That's an indication of how smooth the surface is on the 3D model. The smoothness you see is not due to any display or rendering trick to make things LOOK SMOOTH. But rather, those Zebra Stripes WITHOUT ripples indicate how smooth the model actually is. With time and patience you can get better at using a program like Vectorworks to do this type of work — but you're never really going to be able to tell how smooth your model is without bringing it into a program that has curvature and surface analysis tools The program I used is a $300 program. So if you are going to be doing a lot of boat hull type stuff, you may want to consider using such a program. It just makes life easier. Leave VW for what it specializes in. Architecture, Landscaping, Lighting & Sound set-ups. My two cents. By the way, I used a Polyline and then converted it to Nurbs to make the frame or rib for the boat you see in this post. Worked better than other methods for this particular model. So I would agree with @EAlexander on this point also.

LOL. Got it

And if that printer was still not big enough, then maybe an elongated printer would do the trick https://www.matterhackers.com/store/l/modix-big-120x-v4-3d-printer-kit/sk/MTPRRVG8 https://www.matterhackers.com/store/c/large-volume-3d-printers?srsltid=AfmBOoqhV-4yj46dyox-N3rWXPn0i8KG8Z-fHr7NclPxSA7e74uX2xeb

I might consider 3D printing Elegoo has a printer for $2700 with a big enough print volume An associate of mine raves over Elegoo printers, so I might give that printer a try https://www.matterhackers.com/store/l/elegoo-orangestorm-giga-high-speed-large-format-3d-printer-kit/sk/MSRLJXF4

Rhino has a INTERPOLATE POINTS CURVE and a HANDLE CURVE. The HANDLE CURVE is a bezier style tool with the teeter totter handles, where there are control points COINCIDENT to the curve The interpolate points curve, at the time of creation, places points that are coincident to the curve — but upon finishing the use of this tool, it converts to a nurbs. But the curve will be right where you clicked. Rhino has the ability to convert a nurbs to a Bézier where the points will be on the curve Rhino also has a FAIR CURVE tool where you can adjust the tolerance of how much you want the curve to be smoothed. And Rhino also has a REBUILD command where you can adjust the amount of points and degree of the curve. Rhino also has Zebra analysis of surfaces Rhino has Curvature Graph (curvature combs) for analyzing continuity Grasshopper also has a lot of nodes for parametric curves and surfaces, and the analysis of such Rhino used in the making of the below — https://www.compositesworld.com/articles/fea-facilitates-custom-megayacht-design The course Yacht 3D Modeling with Rhino. Level 1 is endorsed by the Royal Institution of Naval Architects https://navalapp.com/courses/yacht-3d-modeling-with-rhino-level-1/

@Tismacfan.

@Tismacfan. For something along the lines as to the way curtains often can hang ------ Use the Polyline tool set to Cubic Vertex to draw the squiggly lines Use the 3d Polygon tool to draw the straight line Convert all to Nurbs Use Loft Surface set to One Rail Curved Curtain.mov

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A few months back, there was discussion over in the Onshape forum of Autodesk possibly buying PTC. So just now reading for the first time that Autodesk and Nemetschek are now sharing source code, makes me wonder if Nemetschek isn’t getting ready to be absorbed by Autodesk ?? Never was able to program anything before. Tried Marionette and found it to be way more than I wanted to deal with. And it lacked any YouTube videos on how to use it. And when I called tech support, I found that there was no help there. So then I tried the visual programing for Substance Painter and realized that was going to be way to time consuming to learn on top of it not being intuitive. With my recent purchase of Rhino and learning how to use the Rhino tools, I decided to post a question to Google on a good place to learn about Grasshopper. I picked one of the suggested Youtube sites and watched 3 & 1/2 videos with each video being about 26 minutes long I thought I’d give a try to making my first visual programming language definition. Within a short time I had my first definition and then I continued to refine things over the next day. I now was able to draw a slab outline IN RHINO and then use the definition on that curve to make the multi-component wall that went around the exterior of a house. One thing is for sure, as a person that was oh so lame as to doing any type of programing, I was absolutely amazed at how intuitive Grasshopper is. Mind you, I don’t expect every part of learning Grasshopper to go so swimmingly. But this sure is opening my eyes as to why Grasshopper is as popular as it is. A small guy like myself, that is not an architect with a big firm, but a guy that is not always doing CAD day in and day out, I think Rhino is a great way to go, especially hearing all this talk here in this string, and hearing about the collaboration with Autodesk. Glad I am taking the time to get up to speed with Rhino’s and Grasshopper’s UI’s, which are both relatively easy for me to understand the basics of. I am curious as to how some of you older folk, that may be slowing down on your workload, on how you feel about the possibility of paying as much as $3000 a year in not too long. Because from what I was sent, it looks like this could happen a few years down the road. Like I say, glad I am making provision now. Allowing myself time to get up to speed By the way, I’ve learned a lot on how to use Rhino and Grasshopper simply by posting questions to Google. That's another thing I find very convenient

@VIRTUALENVIRONS I would think all the below could do what you posted and likely better. Fusion Rhino Onshape Solidworks NX Alias Plasticity Catia Creo And with all the above, they could do it with better continuity as Vectorworks is lacking in this area of analyzing continuity and curvature No zebra stripes or curvature combs in VW, for one thing. So for highly refined shapes where continuity is the thing, you are not going to be using VW. And if you want to read about Rhinos engineering capabilities, here's a list of plug-ins https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=Plug-ins+does+rhino+have+for+the+engineering+side+of+things&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

My only having to pay $785 for a perpetual license was pretty darn good. And it was not any lesser type of a product at that price. I confirmed with McNeal that who I was buying it from was an authorized dealer, and McNeel said yeah, that's a good deal. Get it from them. So there's that also.

OK so reading your post I thought, I wonder if they finally fixed the door tool. But no, it is not fixed - just the same baloney. The crux of the matter is that with regards to the threshold, that starting from the outside face of the in swinging exterior door, to the exterior bullnose of the threshold, there should be a slant in order to shed water off of that threshold. So the rain runs down the exterior face of the exterior door and falls directly onto a slanted portion of the threshold, and this slant helps to shed that water off. But the program will not allow a slant as I just described if you have two ears of that threshold that extend to the outside of the stucco mold. So I did point this out to tech-support Their solution was to pull the door out of the wall WOW And I have the email showing this. Now I did get it to work by using a very convoluted technique where I reversed the direction of the wall so that the exterior was now indicated as the interior, and then I had to use all these backward inputs to the threshold fields. But there is no way that I am going to use that technique on all exterior walls where I have doors. So this is one more way in which the door tool needs to be fixed.