If you've ever taken a look at Bearboat by Robert Livingston, you'll have a pretty good idea of what I'm doing. I've diverged in presentation, but the approach is still similar. You specify a displacement, shape the kayak in Plan and Profile, specify the volume distribution (curve of areas), and the program computes the hull cross-sectional curvature to achieve the specified underwater area for that section. There are are controls that cross-sectional curve so you can add chines if you want (soft ones, anyway) or sharpen the point at the keel.

There's no curvature plots yet. I'll either implement them or provide an exaggerated curve mode so the user can eyeball it.

I don't model surfaces; it's all very 2D. I make heavy use of cubic Bezier curves. I decided against NURBS because they're harder to smooth. Maybe in a future version I'll play around with them more.

I'd like to assemble a kind of whitepaper on what I've done, but I've been too busy writing the program. If I ever get something written, I'll post it on my website and post a message here with a link.

Feel free to contact me off-line if you would like more info.

Ross

: Ross,

: How about a description of what you have going - how are the surfaces
: generated, are there curvature plots, how many surfaces - that sort of
: stuff?

: Sam