“Hulls” Design to AutoCad 3-d in 3 Easy Steps.
1. Hulls is a great hull design shareware program by Gregg Carlson Hulls Link. Generate your hulls drawing. I use HulWiz HulWiz Link to get started then modify design in Hulls by pulling and stretching each station. Save the completed design then click the “vrml” button on the Hulls main screen. It’s important you “save” the file first just prior to clicking the vrml button (why? don’t know). When you click the vrml button the software will save a file in your default directory with a .wrl extension (the name of the file will be the same name as your hulls design).
vrml button
2. You then need to open up the .wrl file in another 3d program. I’ve been using Crossroads 1.0 (thanks to Boat Design Group member Robert61960 for suggestion). Note: Crossroads is no longer available through the web – my attempts to find it on the web have failed. You can download the zip file here assuming Keith doesn’t mind. Crossroads Zip File (2MB) Once you install Crossroads you can open your .wrl file.
open .wrl file
Once you open the .wrl file in Crossroads, you can immediately save the file as an AutoCad (.dxf) file.
save as .dxf
1. Open the Crossroads generated .dxf file into AutoCad and as if by magic you have 3d version of your Hulls design. I save the segments in a layer and “spline” the segments representing the shear and the chine to get smooth lines I can wok with and add to. This works fine with AutoCadLT 2000 – I bet it works fine with any 3d capable version of AutoCad, and maybe with many other 3d programs as well.
Be careful you don’t open the Hulls generated .dxf file – if you do you’ll get a 2d line drawing, not the 3d segments. If your .dxf file looks like this, you opened the wrong .dxf file.
Result
