the industry-leading ship hull design program has been given a major upgrade. The program incorporates entirely new design aids.
Feature Patches™
A major limitation of NURBS based surface design is that if the designer wants to introduce additional control in one region of a surface he must add complete new rows and/or columns of control points. This proliferation of vertices makes it difficult to produce a fair surface. Autoship 9 introduces a system of introducing local shape control on a surface without dealing with unwanted control points.
A Feature Patch has default or user-defined boundaries. It can be shaped by one or more control points. The patch blends at its edges to the shape of the parent surface. The blend transition may be positional, tangent or curvature continuous.
When a surface has a patch applied, it is still fully editable using only the original control points. When the parent surface shape is changed the patch moves with the change, retaining its own shape.
Patches may overlap and be nested.
