Overview

A surface is the eventual output of the hull design and fairing process. With Lines, this surface is based upon a set of curves that describe its shape. A fundamental shortcoming with focusing purely on these curves is that it is not easy foresee the quality of a surface as work progresses. Not until a significant amount of time and effort has been invested in the creation of the underlying dense mesh of curves and then the creation of the surface patches, can quality be assessed. If the quality of the surface is not acceptable, then significant reworking of the curves may be necessary. What is much more desirable is that the quality of a hull form surface can be assessed at every point in its development. This is what PACE provides.

Using PACE, a B-Spline surface model of the hull can be built, based upon a set of curves that has been built up. The basic stages of doing this are as follows:

• Create a network of active curves that will form the boundaries between individual surface patches.

• Iteratively build and analyze the surface, altering the boundary network to gain improvements.

• Iteratively build and analyze the surface, using different surface building and tangency control options to gain improvements

• Fine-tune the surface fairness by manually manipulating patch control points.

This section places emphasis on the Operations and functionality available to the user. The section Methodology of Generating a Surface using PACE deals with the conceptual and methodological aspects of how to achieve a good result.

For information about the basic operation of PACE and its use for manipulating curves, see Curve Editing using the Patch and Curve Editor (PACE).