drawing 3 views in AutoCAD

[Grant Nelson]

Here I go again... this must have a very simple answer, but I can not figure it out...

I want to work on my three views, plan, body and profile, in the old fashioned mechanical 3 view way. Thus if I draw in a line in a body view, say the top of a berth at station 1, and I want to replicate that lines horizontal position on the plan view, I would, if I used pencil and paper, use a 45 degree line between the body and plan (its up and to the right), and then just project the ends of the line up to the 45 degree line, and then over to the plan view. That gives me the width and I get the longitudinal position from the profile below...

BUT I can not figure out how to do this projection. I have tried osnaps and otracking, and I have tried drawing lines up to the 45, but in all cases I can not get anything to snap onto the 45 degree line exactly perpendicular up from the body plan... the snaps - 'nearest' - starts snaping along a length of the 45 degree line that is not perpendicular - even with ortho on! Thus I can manually get it real close to perpendicular, but there must be a way to auto snap perpendicular up to the 45 degree line.

Or, I am also open to any other approach to drafting the 3 views of a yacht in autocad, so you are sure the parts all line exactly in each fo the three views...

Feeling really dumb, grant.

[Grant Nelson]

Here is what I mean, I want to recreate the 'bed' in the upper left plan view.

[SeaSpark]

As a workaround you could make a block reference from the body view and place it 90deg rotated next to the plan view. You can then take measurements from the body to plan view. Perhaps also from plan to body if autocad permits you to edit the block (dont have acad installed so are not able to try).

[CGN]

Why not use Freeship and have better results?, Freeship let you design your boat and also creates automatic views of the hull that can be saved as a DXF and then use Autocad to finalize the lines drawing.

[Grant Nelson]

What I did not explain well was that I am trying to draw the interior joiner work, not the hull or key bulkheads... I have not tried freeship (I use MaxSurf), but I dont think it will work so well for that... thanks for the input so far however!

[SeaSpark]

If you consider drawing the interior in 3D i would recommend Freeship for the hull shape export (iges) to Rhino and touching up the 2D drawings for construction in Acad.

[CGN]

Rhino will be easier to use than AutoCAD, is capable to model all the interior but I don't know of any tutorials or examples, also for this you need to have the 3D model of the boat at least the surfaces to make the task easier so you can use the model to cut sections of the hull and use this sections as a reference in AutoCAD.

[Tim B]

Generally, I use Rhino and do the interiors in 3D. it is much, much easier than using 2D systems and you can check that everything (including people) fit in.

Tim B.

[solrac]

the answer (in autocad) is quite simple. just define your local coordinate system as an "user coordinate system":
command>UCS
Origin/ZAxis/3Point/Object/View/X/Y/Z/Prev/Restore/Save/Del/?/<World>:
select 3P & pick on origin and 2 other points along the axis you want to define... then you're working on a "user" plane you just define. when you want to return back to the original coordinate system, just type again:
command>UCS and then P (Previous) or W (world coordinate system)
Suggest working on a 3d view (command>DDVPOINT)
good luck