EDS, Catia, Pro/Wildfire?

Does anybody of the larges shipyards here use on of these height end cad-packages?

I'm not talking about hull design and hydrostatic calculations but more for construction, systems routing and interiors design?

Regards, Ries

[nico]

Jeanneau and Beneteau (+cnb,lagoon, etc) are using Solidedge, but slowly switching to Catia.

To add to the above question (I just registered).

We have been evaluating Pro/Wildfire for the design process. NOT for hull design but mostly for structure design. (There is more to a boat then a hull...)

Wildfire looks good and can handle large assemblies as well. I know it's expensive compared to other products like Rhino and such but it's cheap compared to the whole product...

We didn’t bought anything yet and are still evaluating, but the high end packages surely looks interesting.

Ries

[Doug Carlson]

Ries,

My experience with Pro/E has not been in boat or shipbuilding but in manufacturing. I have the basic package plus advanced assembly, surfacing,mechanism design, and Pro/Manufacturing the CAM component. I have used several previous versions and am just now learning Wildfire.

I use it to design and manufacture sheetmetal stamping dies, automated assembly equipment, plastic injection molds, fixturing, product components and horse drawn carriages. I also regularly receive designs (models) from customers that I take directly into machining without conventional drawings.

Its not an easy software to learn but on the other hand I've used it daily for over 7 years and have not run into anything I could not do with it.

Its excellent for modeling sheetmetal structures. It easily handles conical and cylindrical forms when creating flat blanks. It is capable of modelling drawn sheetmetal but the basic sheetmetal module is not capable of finite element analysis required to create flat blanks for draws. There is a "dieface" module which I believe deals with some of those issues.

The "surfaces" module allows one to flatten "quilts" so if your draws are not too radical you can get a good approximation.

One thing that I particularly appreciate about it is that its modeling protocols tend to keep one from creating "bad" models. That doesn't mean you won't design things that can't or shouldn't be made but rather that the model will stand up to material realities and CAM requirements etc.

All in all its an excellent software and it undergoes significant upgrades regularly.

Doug Carlson

[rvt]

Hey Douy,

Pro/E is our nr 1 on the list,
we don't want to use it for hull design because we already have the needed packages for this. But we want to do al the rest with it, including interior design. (we also manufacture most parts of the ship)

One thing is that these kind of software tools aren't used yet on a large scale but I believe in this tools but have a hard time convincing management.

anyway, thank you for your answer.

Ries