Re: Ship Drawing Program

At 01:16 AM 1/5/97 -0500, you wrote:
>I'm trying to come up with new ship designs and was wondering if anybody has
>an idea where I can find a decent floorplan maker for SJ ships. Should I look
>for a commercial product like Corel(Isn't it expensive??).

        I'm conducting some experiments using ray-tracing.  Any program that
generates bitmapped graphs can work for the deck plans.  To get really good
looking results, though, you have to use a CAD/CAM program, and they are
expensive.
        Another alternatative, which is at best a kluge, would be to draw
the ships on paper and then skan them in.  Crude but effective.  %}
        Again though, I'm trying ray-tracing using Point-of-Vision, a
freeware Windows program available on the Internet (I forget the URL... ask
Alta-Vista). Several people have used POV to generate original pictures of
science-fiction ships, most noteably for Star Trek and Star Wars, so I'm
trying it for fantasy. POV images are clearly computer generated, looking
like something from "Toy Story," but that's OK.  This is fantasy.  The
cartoon-look is fitting.  The learning curve on POV is rather steep, so
don't expect big results fast.
        What other routes have people tried?
        Sean, a long time ago, when you made those deckplans, what
program(s) did you use?


Richard Pugh
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