New Wave Systems (USA) released ProSurf 3, a major new version of its hull design and fairing program. After 15 years of development, ProSurf 3 has evolved into a general-purpose trimmed NURB surface modeling program. It offers unique features, such as using edit points that lie on the NURB curves and surfaces, dynamic curvature feedback for fairing, fine tune shaping commands, dynamic geometry constraints, editing and shelling of polysurfaces, plate development and expansion, hydrostatics, stability and resistance calculations and a database of airfoil shapes.

“Over the years, our boat and ship design program has evolved into one that can handle any 3-dimensional shape,” says Stephen Hollister, President of New Wave Systems, Inc. “We wrote all of the code in ProSurf 3. It does not use any third party software or kernel and it contains unique capabilities that cannot easily be duplicated.

Two of the greatest strengths of ProSurf 3 are its detailed surface shaping and fairing tools and its dynamic geometric constraints. After generating surfaces using sweeping, extruding, shelling, lofting, and other techniques, the designer can perform detailed shaping and fairing using fine tune move commands and dynamic curvature feedback information. Combined with the use of edit points that lie on the NURB surface, these commands provide unmatched, detailed shape control required to develop fair surfaces. The designer can also dynamically display any plane-surface or surface-surface intersection while changing the shape of the surface.

ProSurf 3 also provides a number of optional geometric constraints that can be applied to the geometry. One of the most important is the ability to “bond” two surfaces together edge-to-edge. This allows designers to edit and shape connected polysurfaces without having them come apart. These constraints are optional and are defined independently from the geometric entities, which means that they can be added or deleted at any time without affecting the shape of the geometry. Another constraint allows the designer to attach a curve to a surface and use it to trim the shape of the surface. Once defined, the trim curve or the underlying surface can be edited, dynamically showing the changes to the trimmed surface. No untrimming and retrimming is required.