Maxsurf or Autoship

[deej]

I'm doing a comparative study between Maxsurf and Autoship for my company. We usually deal with hull & structural design modification and preperation of stability booklets for existing vessels.

Does any one here have any opinion as to which one would be more suitable for us. The software should be able to give us a composite stability booklet.

I'm attaching the PDF file i've prepared of the comparison between the two. Please let me know your views regarding the same.

Thanks.

[Andrew Mason]

A couple of comments -

Point 1: Approval by classification societies. In general, and contrary to what a lot of people seem to think, classification societies do not approve software for use. They are in the business of approving vessels and are not necessarily qualified to determine whether software is of appropriate quality. BV is an exception to this and have a specific process for validating the results of hydrostatics and stability software.

Lloyds do have ISO 9001 approval processes for the approval of software deveopment processes in general, however this is for any piece of software, not specifically hydrostatics and stability software.

Where some of the confusion lies is that software that is classified as a loading instrument, i.e. it is for onboard use for a specific vessel, is able to be aproved by the class societies. As a result, the onboard versions of Autoship and NAPA (Autoload and NAPA onboard) are approved by various classification societies. Note this is done on a per ship basis. As we do not have a product in the onboard sector of the market we have not sought this form of approval. NAPA and Autoship promote their class approval, but do not state where it is specifically for their general stability software and where it is only for their loading software.

Point 3: I suggest you look carefully at the Maxsurf Parametric Transformation function, it is very powerful and will be even more capable in the next version. The ability to perform nonlinear transforms on a hullshape to vary LCB, Cp, Cma as well as linear scalings for LWL, BWL, draft and displacement, while maintaining hull fairness, is one of Maxsurf's most valuable features.

Points 9,10,11: Workshop is a parametric preliminary structural design program which exports parts to DXF, IGES or directly to ShipConstructor. In our view Shipconstructor is the obvious choice for any yard building steel or aluminium vessels. It is open architecture, based on AutoCAD and has a modular, scalable structure and pricing system. We will be doing further work in future to more tightly couple the parametric features of Workshop with Shipconstructor.

We are also in the process of adding a COM interface to Workshop, this will allow many structural tasks to be automated using tools such as Excel and VBA.

Points 13,14,23,24,29: Maxsurf already includes a complete COM interface. Hydromax, Hullspeed and Seakeeper have had their COM interfaces completed and are currently in the testing phase. These will be available early next year. The COM interfaces will dramatically open up what can be done with the software. If a specific function does not currently exist in one of the programs, it is highly likely that it can be created using the existing COM interface being driven through a VB program running within Excel. For example, although Hydromax does not produce Bonjean curves, they could be calculated using Excel and the COM interface. A complete probabilistic damage stability analysis for a vessel could concievably be scripted from Excel through COM.

Similarly, COM can be used to extract results from stabilty calculations and format them into a predefined report. We see this as the way forward with Hydromax, allowing the user to define a report template in Excel and use COM to run the analysis and fill out the required fields.

If you have any other questions regarding Maxsurf's capabilities please let me know.

[Mikey]

One software will not give all you need, ever. But with MaxSurf and Hydromax, you have Andrew to ask and as you saw, he is quick and helpful. That's worth quite a lot

Merry Christmas to You All
Mikey

[Rangiroa]

What are the difference between the two software? I think shipconstructor is a very intelligent solution for the price scalable system: why should I buy Workshop if shipconstructor make the same things?
Moreover, does someone use ShipCam for hull design?

Thanks

[Andrew Mason]

Good question. There is some overlap between the Shipconstructor Hull module and Workshop, however there are substantial differences as well. Workshop can be considered to be preliminary structural design (i.e. it deals with rapidly defining major structural members) whereas ShipConstructor covers detailed structural design (it allows you to define all structure down to the smallest bracket if you wish) as well as all of the piping, HVAC, outfitting and production requirements.

Workshop is highly parametric, you can change the stringer layout, frame and deck positions and even hull shape and have all parts recalculate automatically.

As such it is brilliant for initial structural design when you are working through several design iterations. It allows you to generate approximate structural weights and centres to feed back into Hydromax for stability and floodable lengths, which may result in changes to bulkhead loactions. It allows you to get started on the hull stucture early, even before you have a fully faired final hull shape.

ShipConstructor is not parametric in the same way as Workshop is, it really assumes you have a final hull shape and have locked down the sizes and locations of the structural members prior to commencing work in ShipConstructor. As structure can be created and modified in Workshop very quickly, you can save a lot of time using it prior to starting work in ShipConstructor.

As a result we have found that most ShipConstructor clients that we deal with use Workshop as a front end so that they can generate a more optmal structure in a shorter period of time.

We have implemented a custom file output that takes parts directly from Workshop into ShipConstructor, complete with some attributes, in future we will be expanding this to insert parts from Workshop directly into the ShipConstructor product model.

Hope this clarifies things.

Andrew

[PNACS]

One advantage that I feel Autohydro & GHS have over Hydromax is creation & utilization of "run file" (Set of commands and Controls created to suit customized requirements). I understand hydromax do not have this option in their current version.

A Run file can be prepared to perform sequence analysis and customized to suit our reqyirements. These run files can be saved and utilized when you have to repeat a sequence of analysis with modified parameters. This Saves alot of time.

Otherwise, I feel Hydromax & Maxsurf are more professional in "software quality" than autoship and autohydro.

Regards

[Andrew Mason]

A run file typically does two things that aren't covered in the standard user interface - the specification of stability criteria and the running of calculations in batch mode.

Hydromax covers the stability criteria in a far more elegant way than GHS, with a large number of parent criteria that are customised to the requirements of individual codes. The parent criteria are programmed into Hydromax and have been through a comprehensive quality assurance program, unlike the criteria in GHS whch are scripted and easy to make mistakes with. The Hydromax stability criteria are one of the program's strongest points, and I doubt that anything as powerful or flexible has been implemented in any other stability program anywhere in the world. If you wish to get a better insight into the depth of capability in this area, please have a look at chapter 4 of the Hydromax manual available at http://www.formsys.com/maxsurf/msdocumentation. This chapter shows how comprehensive the stability criteria implementation is, it is 75 pages of text and diagrams.

For batch processing, Hydromax allows you to do this from one dialog, specifying which analysis types you want to perform. Hydromax then calculates data for all loadcases against all damage cases and oututs to a (long) text file.

For other custom programming, Hydromax now has a COM interface which allows you to write scipts in VBA within Excel and drive Hydromax as a black box calculation engine. This allows you to do all sorts of esoteric analysis that would not normally be included as a standard function.

In the end you get the best of both worlds, a powerful, easy to use stability program with a true windows interface, together with the flexibility an programmability of the VBA scriping language.

[PNACS]

Thank You Mr. Andrew. Customizing Hydromax stability engine with VBA script will be an intersting area to explore. It is not covered in standard user manual. Could you provide link to any related article?.

[Andrew Mason]

It's new in Version 12 of Hydromax, which is in Beta test at the moment. It is expected to be released in March.

There have been a couple of articles in the past couple of months in The Naval Architect magazine showing some examples of the COM interface being used from Excel for things such as launching calculations and barge loading and unloading, if you have access to these they make interesting reading.

Note that the COM interface has also been added to all our analysis applications, including Hullspeed and Seakeeper, allowing stability and performance calculations to be controlled from a single VBA script. This allows things such as multi-objective optimisation of a design to be performed, using the COM interface to Maxsurf to modify the geometry and the COM interfaces to Hullspeed, Seakeeper and Hydromax to provide the objective functions.

[pankguru4]

I am using Maxsurf and I am very comfortable with it.

[masih]

Hi My friends
I am working with Autoship for Hull modeling and Auto hydro for stability booklet, i find it user friendly, but Auto power for propulsion system is not well.

[pavel915]

I prefer autoship to model the hull ,
but I think hydromax is much more smarter than autohydro.
and autopower is not good for resistance and propulsion.

[zeroname]

i think maxsurf is more user friendly than autoship . though model maker is good for a better hull modeling, and the new maxsurf v 14 i think is much better than other version. i am interested about it watching some videos .
autopower is also good for power and resistance prediction but hullspeed is more advance. in general i like maxsurf much.

[valoche]

Hello, I'm looking for Autohydro's reference manual as pdf file to see how it works. is it possible for anyone to attach one to a reply ? thanks

[Guest62110524]

so, if one does all of the structure in Rhino can one take it into Workshop to do the things you posted somewhere in this thread?