Has anyone ever taken a run and automating this? We (and I mean human race) have thousands of these plans in a relatively consistent format. I see no impossible to overcome challenges in creating a tool that can output to formats importable by CAD and creative modelers (MAX etc.), by extracting the station frame curves and positioning them on a correct keel and generating a skinned/solid model. If wer can extract the station frames, we could easily tween the values between station frames to generate the intervening frames.
I'm not saying it would be easy, but I think it's doable, and it seems to me we have enough interested parties and groups that it might be worth doing - imagine there being a library of skinned and solid models with correct hull forms, wales, gunports, would have to draw the line at the head and the stern, too variable and complex. But still if we got that far, modelers, historians, games and movie people, all could access all of these sailing models for whatever purpose they need. And the processing would still require some human input to indicate the correct areas to scan for the curves and which is bow and which is stern, and marking the keel location and length and probably a couple other steps to prime the tool for each unique plan.
Only step I'm iffy on is automated generating of spline-based curves for the station frames, I'm not sure that I know of a product doing that, turning 2d drawings into vector/spline-based lines. I have some idea of companies I could ask who should be able to do it. But also I'll see if I can track this guy down, this was a proposal to do the exact same thing for old rocket parts.(FYI - that's a PDF). This is just the proposal, not clear he did it.
Anyone else know of existing tools/companies/researchers who might find this problem interesting?
I sent some mail to the guy who put together that presentation, will see if he answers. Matrim I wouldn't anticipate you could just point the tool at a bunch of plans and walk away, there would still be a degree of human input to make sure the plan is clean and marking locations of certain items before it could make an attempt to build at the very least. Are you saying you've found the drawings are stretched somehow? I thought generally speaking the paper used for these plans was fairly heavy and would be resistant to something like that. Yes, that would be very difficult to correct.
