Monday afternoon, i finally played with Punch! Home & Garden, NexGen, after a month of sitting on it uninstalled.
I noticed the stair tool and played with it. I thought, "VCP NEEDS THIS!". I exported the floorplan, but the staircase -- imported as DXF -- came in as flat as everything else in the dxf. I exported the floorplan as VRML, and then hit a wall. VCP can EXport VRML. Why cannot VCP IMport VRML? I would then be able to export VRML from VCP, go into H&G and create nice stairs as suited for a particular area of my ship, and then re-export from H&G to VCP my inclined ladders (stairs). But, that is time-consuming and runs the risk of losing data once in a while.
So, why not port that stairs tool to VCP? We already have windows and walls, but i can do next to nothing with those in a ship design. Stairs for making inclined ladders and maybe vertical ladders with rungs, risers, and treads spacing--- that would be worth paying an extra $30.
Please, ViaCAD needs to create hope and possibility to incorporate plugins that are quality and well-vetted. VCP is admirable in many, many blatant and nuanced ways. I'd love to see APIs opened to VCP and Shark so that I could motivate nautical types of programmers to volunteer or make for trial and sale a number of maritime plugins.
Some possible plugins naval architecture programmers might include:
- initial stability calcs
- damaged/flooding/free-flooding stability calcs
- inclined ladders creation
- downflooding points
- auto-creation of arrays of stanchions to create safety hand railing
- automatic insertion of proper-height watertight doors, frames, and animated moving parts
- auto-alignment or alignment optimization of engine shaft and engine and propeller
- volume calculation WITHOUT HAVING TO SOLIDIFY THE WHOLE COMPARTMENT just to get liquids weights
- auto-conversion of imported meshes into sideshell faithful to the mesh, avoiding the VERY time-consuming effort of manually doing it
- creation of tanks based on interior surface of the hull and the deck's bottom face
- quasi- but very rudimentary capability CFD/FEA/FEM plugins, for basic sanity checking
- improved sweep to enable simultaneous creation of numerous extrudes of stiffeners in one go
- interactive editing of meshes or surfaces having gaps, which takes time for each over-gapped surface or mesh that fails to stitch...
VCP and Shark have a HUGE amount of potential. Hobbyists using VCP and Shark are not limited to surgical and car parts and home furniture and engines parts or vehicles. There are a number of open-source-minded developers who would take the time to produce worthwhile plugins that are not encumbered by patents, since their work is constrained by the laws of physics, and automation is mainly a vastly sped-up approach to hand calculations.
Then, the crem-de la-crem for me would be someone making a firebird, SQLite or similar database plugin to suppland or displace the BOM. The BOM as it is could be quickly overrun by someone actually building a model of a ship or airplane, given that those vehicles have millions of parts in 10s of thousands of subassemblies.
Please, open up some APIs. A good start would be finding a way to blend Freeship and ViaCAD to make some sort of ViaShip product. Charge $300. I'd pay for it. Charge $400 for it! I'd PAY for it! If it has at a minimum the plugins i suggest above, plus SQLite, I'd pay $400 for this without even thinking about it. But, please create the app in a tool that is as self-contained as possible and will run from a single executable in a virtual environment so that it can run in Linux, not just in Mac or win. It's possible, and if you can tap virtualization, and let VirtualBox and VM ware do the rest, we could have an OS-agnostic ViaCAD and Shark installation.
Let's get a bet rolling soon, please, Tim.
