One of the main objectives of PolyCAD is to provide a way of converting from one geometric representation and another. Polyline curve representations can be generated from mathematical and polygon surfaces.
Contours can be generated from all surface representations. These can be extracted from a surface as a group of Polylines and manipulated as a separate entity.
PolyCAD has its own hydrostatic calculations and transforms any surface data into section curves so that it can integrate the surface area and volume. Calculation sections are produced by initially generating 21 equally spaced polyline curves. The number of sections is then refined by checking the accuracy of integration results with a predefined tolerance. The internal calculation sections can be extracted as a group of Polylines, manipulated further and exported for use in other analysis tools.
Section data can also be imported into PolyCAD from other file formats and a range of different interfaces is supported. Data can be imported using comma separated value (CSV) format. This allows offset data to be entered into spreadsheet systems such as Microsoft Excel and imported into PolyCAD as section data.