PolyCAD

PolyCAD is a lightweight software application that facilitates a professional workspace and advanced tools to help you create and design 3D boat models. It doesn't require installation.

Since this is a portable product, you can launch PolyCAD by just clicking its executable file directly from a pen drive or other removable storage unit. Unlike most installers, this app doesn't modify the Windows registry configuration.

Wrapped up in a large window that contains a ribbon bar with numerous options, PolyCAD lets you create geometry project files (.geo format) as well as import and export data to a long range of file extensions compatible with HullCAD, Proteus, AutoCAD, AutoSHIP, GridGen, and so on.

When it comes to the design, you can view waterlines, snap to points or line-segment midpoints, insert polylines, boxes, point clouds and other objects, edit entities and assign attributes, change the grid spacing, major frequency and key nudge, analyze hydrostatics, manage isophotes, scale the curvature, check out any modeling errors, use a calculator, as well as create and run macros for repetitive tasks.

Moreover, the tool enables you to customize the colors of most aspects (e.g. background, selected objects, major grid), set the axis icon location and adaptive degradation, alter the view rotation mode, adjust the surface curvature, and so on.

We haven't encountered any unpleasant surprises as far as stability is concerned, thanks to the fact that PolyCAD didn't hang, crash or display error messages throughout our evaluation. Surprisingly, it had low impact on computer performance, needing low CPU and RAM to work properly.

Taking into account its rich and advanced utilities dedicated to designing 3D boat models, PolyCAD should please most users looking for a free CAD application with extensive file type support.