I've yet to put this stellar-looking piece of software through its paces, but from what I can tell so far, this should be a really, really swell tool for those among us who do organic-mechanical modeling.
The program is called FreeShip, and it can be found here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/freeship/files/FREE%21ship/Version%202.6/And yes, you guessed it, it's free.
All you need to get is the manual and the executable. From what I've seen so far, all the features are documented, and it looks pretty straight forward. For those flying battleship moger-ers around here, this is the ideal tool to carve out those hulls with.
This application does a lot more than most of us need it to, though probably not as much as a professional naval architect would want. What interests me however, are the modeling features to be found here. This program models in subdivisions, but unlike other programs that pack subdivision modeling tools, this one seems to get it right! You can define hard edges that will stay sharp, put rib-like features in, etc., etc. So although if you wanted to generate a model or part of a model in this program (yes, it does output wavefront object
), you would need to do a lot of combining of surfaces to reduce the polycount to usable levels, think of the shapes you could generate! Or the base models from which to derive normal maps! I'm quite excited to try this program out, and I hope someone else here will take interest as well.
