It was a problem personal project I did a few years ago. I was writing an editor for ship hulls that would allow a non-technical user to model a ship hull out o

It was a problem personal project I did a few years ago. I was writing an editor for ship hulls that would allow a non-technical user to model a ship hull out of 3 sets of bezier curves - one for the side profile, one for top-down, and one for front-back. Pics at bottom. The hard part was taking those 3 sets of bezier curves and turning it into a 3d mesh. There's no pleasant mathematical way to do this directly, and there's no way to convert the 3 sets of curves into a 2d bezier surface. The eventual solution involved several steps - first the top-down curve was rasterized into points at intervals of N on the X axis (from front of hull towards back). The maximum distance between any two sets of symmetric points was used to "scale" the front-back view so that the endpoints of each copy of the front-back view would match each set of symmetric points on the top-down view. At this point, each set of symmetric top-down points has a matching front-back curve that connects the two points. Now each front-back curve is rasterized at intervals of I on the Y axis (from port to starboard). At this point I have all the points I need and could actually rasterize them into a mesh, but with one problem - the side-view curve still isn't accounted for. If I were to rasterize it at this point, the ship would probably look like a bullet cut in half. So to take the side profile curves into consideration, the side view was rasterized like the top-down curves were, into points at intervals of N on the X axis. These points are converted into proportions (from 0 to 1) of how far they are from the top deck relative to the deepest point on the side-profile curve. Finally, each proportion was multiplied with the Z components of each point on the point-rasterized front-back curves. In this way, the side-profile just acts like a "scale" to how deep the front-back curves are allowed to go. I was pretty happy with the results - however the mesh had densities in bad places that I later smoothed out using bicubic interpolation. I don't have any pics of final product, but here's some of it before the interpolation phase: http://i.imgur.com/PqX1aWL.png http://i.imgur.com/PqX1aWL.png http://i.imgur.com/se9YdoO.png http://i.imgur.com/se9YdoO.png http://i.imgur.com/oK4taXA.png http://i.imgur.com/oK4taXA.png