I need to skin a boat hull. The manual describes a surface skinning method that would exactly suit my requirements, but unfortunately it seems to be out of date:
The first thing to do, in side view (3 NumPad), is to add a Surface Curve. Be sure to add a Surface curve and not a curve of Bézier or NURBS flavour, or the trick won’t work (A Surface curve for skinning).
My Blender version 2.48a doesn’t offer any other curves than Bézier and NURBS.
The screen shot in the manual shows a cure that looks like a Path, but if I try to follow the tutorial with the path I also get stuck.
Any hints on how to surface skin in the current version of Blender?
Just do ADD > SURFACE > NURBS SURFACE or NURBS CURVE
Then duplicate the surface while in edit mode as many times as needed (making sure that the surface segments have the same number of vertices).
When you have altered the segments to be the shapes you require, select all the vertices in each segment and then press ALT-F. Assuming the vertice number in each segment match you should get a hulled/skinned surface.
Attached is a Blend file showing an example.
On the left in the file is the original unhulled surface and on the right is the same surface duplicated in object mode and then hulled in edit mode.
Thanks terry_wallwork and Morio, that works well.
I did a quick test with a trimaran float. I converted the skinned surface to a mesh. So far so good. But then I added a sheet perpendicular to the x-axis which cuts the hull in 2 halfs (front and rear). I applied a boolean modifier to cut out the cross section in the sheet.
This is where Blender messed up completely.
I attached the sample file. Any idea what is wrong here? Is this a bug? Or am I doing something wrong?