Welcome to the launching of the Boat Design Students Image Gallery. The gallery will be dressed overall for a while, until it has well and truly set out into the stormy seas of the Internet. This gallery has been set up for students of the Westlawn course in Yacht Design. Due to the nature of the course we all seem to work in isolation. Even if we are lucky enough to find a group of other students nearby that we can get together with, there are many more spread out around the world that we will never meet. This site aims to bring us all together and help to foster a sense of community no matter where we are in the world, as a sort of visual adjunct to the forum ( more on this later ). By all means, send me images that you would like to submit. You are by no means limited to computer generated drawings, feel free to send in scanned images of hand drawings. Visit the submission page for more details.Please note that this site is not in any way sanctioned by the Westlawn Institute of Marine Technology, and it is a completely independent effort set up by a student, for other students.

I've noticed that there have been quite a few visitors in recent times, thanks for coming. I must apologise for the lack of updates. I'm afraid that I am having licensing problems with my CAD and rendering software, most particularly for my rendering software which I have paid for, but not yet received. Hopefully this will be resolved by the end of the month, and as soon as I receive it I will try and begin updating with a vengeance ! Please be aware that I accept contributions from other students as well, I didn't set this gallery up just for myself. If you would like to contribute something then please visit the submissions page. I will accept anything you would like to offer, the gallery is by no means limited just to 3d renderings. I am even happy to accept scanned drawings. This galleries purpose is to help Westlwan students see what other students are up to, and to share ideas. So if you have anything you think other students may be interested in seeing, then send it on in.

If you have just surfed on in, and are interested in finding out more about the Westlawn yacht design courses, then visit the Westlawn site for more information.

If you would like a copy of the signal flags I used to dress the gallery, email me with your preference of image format.

For your viewing pleasure, there are a few things I should mention. First off, these pages look best when viewed at a resolution of 800 x 600 or greater. Try though I might, this is the smallest size I could satisfactorally fit things in. Secondly, things look best using thousands of colors ( 16 bit ) or greater. Lastly, if you are using a PC and you find things look a little dark and gloomy then you may want to fiddle with your monitors brightness and contrast. Due to differences in the gamma settings of a Mac and PC's this could easily happen. All of the site and contributions so far have been produced on Macs, and if I produced things with a PC in mind they'd look terrible to me, and I wouldn't be able to get a good impression of how things were shaping up. Hopefully you won't find this too much of a hassle, and enjoy your visit to the gallery.

The following images aren't the only things you can submit to the gallery, feel free to submit whatever you want. They need not even be directly related to the course, if you have drawn something of a marine theme you think we may be interested in, by all means send it along. Click here for more information on submitting images.

	This is a simple line drawing that has been rendered in a CAD program using Phong rendering with antialiasing. You don't need to have a fancy 3d rendering to submit to the gallery. We are very egalitarian here ! This image was first saved as a PICT ( on a Mac, I would suggest a TIFF on a PC ) and then I reduced the colors and saved it as GIF. You should be able to find a good shareware image editor on any of the online shareware archives. Shareware.Com is a good place to start. Line art lends itself to being turned into a GIF very well, especially if you don't have a lot of different line colours.
	Here is another example of a line drawing. This one wasn't rendered at all, it was simply saved as an image. As you can see it doesn't look too bad, and the only thing that hasn't come through too well is the linestyles. This is the general arrangement of the boat in the previous picture.
	Here is the first contribution not from the webmaster ! It's a nice rendering of a 28' trimaran, even more impressive for the fact that it was done without the benefit of a hull modelling program.
	This is the profile view of a 9m yacht, based on Bristol Channel cutters but with a more modern hull.
	This is the plan view of the above yacht.
	This is a picture illustrating just why DXF is not too great for boat shapes. UPDATE Actually, since I have been fooling around with DXF for a program I am writing that models sea surfaces, I have found that DXF will indeed support smooth surfaces. I'll explain further on the page for this image.
	Here is a great, slightly surreal, rendering of a trimaran.
	Well after much preaching and gabbling about the merits of 3d on the forum, I decided I'd better put my money where my mouth is and come up with something actually done in 3d ! Here is the preliminary profile of a 9m yacht, in fact the same one as the 2d drawings above.
	This is a close up of the above picture, hopefully showing the boat itself more clearly.
	Here is a view from above of the previous boat.
	This is the preliminary general arrangement for a 38'/11.6m sport cruiser, with flybridge.
	This is the preliminary profile for a 38'/11.6m sport cruiser, the sames boat as above.

The Forum is an online conference centre set up by Westlawn for students to discuss things related to the course. It is an excellent resource which is currently being somewhat under utilised. There are a wide range of people with different expertise that are doing the course, and it is good to be able to ask for help from them. So far the conversations had on the forum have been very useful, and it would be excellent to get more of you to use it. The forum can be reached from the main Westlawn site, follow the Online Conference Center and Lecture Hall link.