Automatic surface modelling of a ship hull

When defining a ship hull surface, the main objective is to obtain a faired surface or surfaces that contain some specific points of the hull, that have been selected in the design process and give the ship its hydrodynamic, stability and other properties. So, the hull surface should be a compromise between fairness and precision, and this is not and easy task. In this paper, authors present a thorough procedure for automatic modelling with a fair NURBS surface, having lists of points on the stations of the vessel as initial data. The construction of spline curves, and their application in the definition of ship lines is reviewed. Approximation of spline curves fitting the data on the stations is made, with special emphasis on the choice of parametrization, which is relevant to increase the accuracy of the splines. NURBS surfaces modelling the hull of the vessel are constructed and the fairing process adapted to maintain certain ship characteristics is described. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.