HulWizBeta 1.0 |
| What is the relationship between HulWiz and Hulls? |
Hulls is a program -
Gregg Carlson's Hull Designer program.
Neither HulWiz, this page, or its author are associated with Mr. Carlson
or Carlson Design, who own all rights to the Hull Designer program.
Gavin Atkin offers a superb tutorial on the Hull Designer program. HulWiz "feeds" Hulls with a file generated from your inputs. You could say that HulWiz is primarily a shortcut to save you some trouble in entering offsets into Hulls. HulWiz generates a hull surface which is intended to serve as a starting point. Once loaded into Hulls, it can be worked with the same as any other .hul file. It may, after adequate consideration, be directly useable or it may serve as a beginning file to be modified. It may be that changing offsets or other modifications made via Hulls will satisfy you, or that returning to HulWiz with a slightly different set of inputs will improve your results. Best of luck! |
| Does HulWiz "feed" anything else besides Hulls? | Not really. |
| What's with the hokey cutting and pasting into Notepad? |
I'm working on it. Didn't want to hold HulWiz up any further.
Different browsers and browser releases work differently as regards writing files to your hard drive - it's a security matter which different ones handle differently. I'll probably make it optional. It will certainly "ask permission" before writing anything. |
| Will HulWiz always do exactly as I say? |
Unknown bugs aside, almost.
HulWiz builds a file which follows various rules and ideas of boat proportioning, following your inputs. If it can do so, HulWiz will proportion the output hull surface according to these rules, and the LOA and total displacement you provided. HulWiz attempts to manipulate beam, draft, and rocker to accomodate these two basic factors. If adjusting these factors does not accomplish the input goals within programmed proportioning rules, then as a last resort HulWiz will lengthen the LOA in one-foot increments until it can succeed. All other specifications are followed exactly, and are proportioned to the basic proportions thus calculated. |
| Say what? | Yes, except that it might have to make it longer than you said if it's really heavy. |
| Are there any unknown bugs? | I don't know. |
| Should I read the disclaimer? | Yes. Please read the disclaimer. |
| I tried this really weird set of inputs to describe the oddest boat I could think of, and the file that resulted looked really silly and unsafe to me. What do you think of that? | Well, duh. |
| How does HulWiz basically do its thing? |
Once it determines the basic proportions (see above) Hulwiz then calculates three stations - the stem, stern,
and midships stations - according to user selections on section shape, profile, etc.
If needed, it inserts an additional chine to create a "fold" for tumblehome or certain stem/stern profiles.
Then, it interpolates the remaining two stations. (Later, when loaded into Hulls, Hulls will further fair the lines.)
Next, it adds (in proportion to the hull surface established so far) the various top features and foils, if specified.
Somewhere in there it also determines the sailing rig size based on a single upright jibheaded main,
which is not necessarily appropriate to your intended uses, but it's easy to calculate. The sail area and
other rig details, as with all other results, should be carefully considered and may be inappropriate
to your use.
More outputs will be added later. Probably ;-) Finally, it writes the whole mess in Hulls 1.81 format. |
| Say what? | Oh, never mind. It's all magic. |
| Does it work with earlier versions of Hulls? | I don't know. Hulls is free, so why not get the current version (see above)? |
| Does it work with later versions of Hulls? | To my knowledge, 1.81 is the latest version. At least it was about an hour before I wrote this. |
| Why did you write HulWiz? | Because it wasn't there. |
