I have just finished a new addon to design sails with Blender. Is a bit primitive, but is meant to use as much as possible what is already available in Blender without trying to make specific tools for 3D design.
What is really available is the algorithm to flatten a 3D surface and a couple of algorithm to generate the profile of the sail.
The motivation for this work is, apart from the wish to design a sail, to have a free tool that can accomodate different type of sail profiles and is expandable. Blender was providing an already available 3D manipulation and visualization tool and was a good point where to start.
I have started a website for the addon, that you can find at http://sailflow.weebly.com. There you will find also the link to the videos explaining how to use the tool and what techniques to use to design sails.
I am interested in find people interested in this topic and may be interested in working together to expand the addon.
Interesting. I can’t say I will be using it any time soon, but when I do use it I expect it will be really useful. Thanks for taking the time to make this! May try and make a sail boat now :3
The new version of sailflow is on the server. It has improved profile with the possibility of having a parabolic decrease of lift towards the extremities of the sail. Also the PDF print now support overlap when split across multiple pages and also support custom format where you can select the paper size.
The flatten has been improved and now support the polygon number seed, meaning the polygon from where to start flattening. The algorithm result can depend upon the starting polygon (face). Also the stress relief algorithm is highly optimized and is now very fast.
Results are so much better.
I have developed a new sail and made a scaled paper version first, then I create a full scale PDF and send to a print shop.
Finger crossed.
It have something interesting news for me. i need to developing the new sail scaled paper with PDF. I need your suggestion for creating this. And i want the information about to creating the sail profile. What is best method for creating the sail profile give your suggestion for my decision.