SailScience Company Profile

The programs catered for both the sailmaker-come-expert sail trimmer who was reliant on seat of the pants visual designing to the highly qualified theoretical. They moved design work from the loft floor in to the more controlled environment of an office, and the software's ability to drive plotcutters introduced an accuracy into sailmaking and assembly beyond the imagination.

All of a sudden the measurabilty, accuracy and speed of sail development took a quantum leap forward.

Historically, sailmakers would make successive small changes to mylar patterns or to seam shaping formulas -- adjusting a seam or two and seeing the resultant change in the sail's shape. This process could take several weeks each year for class sails, and possibly years of continual development for large yacht sails.

By contrast, the software-supported 3 dimensional design enabled this change of sail shape by quickly and simply modifying a mathematical mould, then automatic calculation of what's required to turn that shape into a sail.

Over the years, the programs have had continual development and refinement, and the routines have been expanded to cater for all types of yachts, sails, sail systems, panel configurations and fabrics. As much emphasis has been placed on construction, assembly and manufacturing as on pure design.

Development has been mainly reliant on customer feedback, as the need to expand from dinghies, cruising and performance keelboats to America's Cup, Whitbread Maxi's and Whitbread 60's to the world's largest luxury and performance mega yachts so the programs themselves have had to expand to cope.

With nearly 200 companies using the software today and continually updating, development has not only been rapid but also suprisingly cheap as the cost is spread between so many. A new update with up to 20 new features normally costs around NZ$500 to NZ$600, a tiny fraction of the cost compared to the cost of customisation.

Today SailMaker the design system is directly interactive with a number of additional modules which SailScience has developed over the years, expanding the software's ability and flexibilty dramatically while remaining a very simple and user friendly system.

While SailMaker had the ability to generate most of the accepted panel configurations in vogue in the late eighties, it was restricted to a fixed number. The need was for a program which could give total flexibilty and generate any type of configuration a designer could dream up. PatternMaker was developed in the very early nineties, a module which works directly within SailMaker and allows almost total freedom of choice of panel layouts and configurations.

For information about PatternMaker software, follow this link

In the late eighties asymmetric spinnakers were becoming increasingly popular and it soon became apparent that a specialist design system for them was required for their specialist needs.

The release of the Asymmetric design program in the very early nineties was a trend setter and must have been close to a world first which put SailScience user's technology way ahead of most other sail lofts.

The new software's success was almost immediate with Grant Dalton's Whitbread Maxi "New Zealand Endeavour" and Chris Dickson's Whitbread 60 "Tokio", both excelling in the 1993-94 Whitbread race with designs from Asymmetric.

Also in the early nineties, SailMaker was made interactive with Relax, the first commercially available program of its type which could reside in and be run by a desktop computer.

Essentially the configured and panelled sail file can easily be imported into Relax, a few of the primary values of the yacht is specified along with the fabrics modulus and position within the sail. The wind speed and angle can be specified, then pressure is calculated and introduced to the sail surface via the aerodynamic routines. The sail can be trimmed with varying halyard, sheet and or outhaul tension, and by moving car or lead positions back and forward as this is being done, shape changes can be monitored and adjusted if required.

In August 2000, SailMaker was also interfaced with Relax 2, a much more sophisticated version of Relax Mk1.

The primary difference between the two is the much more sophisticated aerodynamics and that it is not only able to model and moniter sail shape change under load but also quantify the design shape required to match target shapes once under load.

Symmetric Spinnaker design took a quantum leap in the mid nineties when a new program was created utilising the full power of SailMaker. Automatic Fairing which had been available in SailMaker for a number of years was now also available for symmetric spinnaker design. This was a major advancement in the design of symmetrical spinnakers where total fairness is required for the flying stability required for high performance down wind.

Plotmaker also under gone dramatic change over the years. In the mid nineties PlotMaker CAD was released. This version can import files from other CAD programs where they can be edited, nested and then plotcut on large industrial machines which are not normally available to the CAD programs in which they were originally designed.

In the late nineties, such features as Auto Nest were incorporated in to the program in an effort to minimise design and production time. In 2000, the program has been modified to meet the manufacturing demands of industries other than sailmakers -- now blind, tent, marquee and most flexible membrane manufacturers can take advantage of PlotMaker's sophisticated routines and systems.

A whole new program was released in August 2000 -- SurfaceMaker. Complementary to most CAD programs such as Autocad and Vectorworks plus any CAD program that can output a DFX File, SurfaceMaker can import a file then use the highly sophisticated Panel Development routines inherent in SailMaker to create panels on most shapes and sizes of flexible structures designed and manufactured today.

SurfaceMaker not only incorporates PatterMaker as a standard feature it also incorporates a number of preformatted pattern routines specifically used in the industry. With a few minutes to setup then just a few seconds to calculate, SurfaceMaker is far faster and accurate than the clumsy, laborious and generally inaccurate methods used todate.

Company Profile - Development of the Sail Design Systems