For those of you into board design I thought I would walk you through a little challenge I have had. For years I have been designing in Alias which is a sophisticated design tool widely used by the automotive design studios globally. The surf industry is dominated by a few CAD software's Shape 3D and BoardCAD being two of the widely used ones. None of these programs will read complex Nurbs surface which all my boards are and it is nearly impossible to find a surfboard CNC that is not driven by one of the surf specific systems. So in my frustration I got a one month Shape 3D licence to see if I could re-create my more complex designs.
I started with a board I have recently been messing around with,which is a double inverted V bottom shape....interesting hey!!! I created an SDL file from the nurbs surface I had done and brought the SDL into Shape 3D as a "ghost board" which I can trace or use as reference. I then re-created all the curves and sections and rebuilt it. It took me a while to figure out how to do the double inverted V as the workflow is really different but I eventually got there. You can't get the detail as precise as a more sophisticated design system, especially around the nose but it is fine for a core which needs some hand sanding anyway before it is sandwiched.
Now to re-do all my existing designs