What Software is used for Boat Design?

[derek59]

Hi Guys, I'm looking around at what software you use for boat design? I have extensive Solidworks experience and would be keen to use that (the latest version is just so intuitive) - but thought I would get some other opinions. Many thanks - Derek.

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Builders Hamilton

[DCockey]

See the "sticky" threads at the top of the Software forum index for what is popular with folks who chose to respond to the polls:
Best Marine Design Software for Hull Modeling? (2010)
Best Free or Low Cost Marine Design Software? (2008-2010)

What's best for you depends on your objectives, your experience, and what software and hardware you have and want to use.

"Intuition" in software use is heavily dependent on your experience with the software and other software.

[ACuttle]

In short Solidworks is great for structural work in metal (and possibly wood) but less good (very poor infact) for hull-form design.

An answer to a similar question:

I've done boats in a few of these so for what its worth, this is my 20p's worth;

Rhino is good for producing hull forms and developing plating. For structural work it's a bit poorer. There's no true 3D structural design elements so you'd pretty much just be doing 2D drafting in a 3d enviroment. There are plugins that give you some naval-architecture tools but I've always had other software to use instead.

Previously I've worked a lot with Rhino for surfacing and Solidworks for producing structural models. Then working back and forth between them for a finished product - but you're looking at about £10k worth of software there.

Inventor and Solidworks are pretty much interchangable, they're both very strong for producing 3D parametric models, good for flat structure and folded sheet-metalwork. However neither are designed for marine applications and as a result with both you pay for a lot of functionality that you will never use. To handle decent sized vessels 20m+ you'd need decent machine to run it. SW (and likely Inventor) doesn't like creating working geometry/models for complex curved forms - like most hulls.

A program I've looked at in other industries is Alibre, which works very similarly to SW and comes in at a much more reasonable price, for an smallscale/non-comercial user this linked with Rhino may make a very effective package, for about £3-4k.

Shipconstructor is good too but has a very hefty price-tag. It's designed for straight-up marine work but you'll still need to be getting your hullform from somewhere (Rhino, maxsurf etc.) - to make SC worthwhile you'd have to be designing a lot of boats and be doing craft of a decent size.

I couldn't easily say which I prefer, SW and SC are both great in their own way (and less helpful in others) and I've never found anything better than Rhino for doing the early work. At the end of the day I've always used Rhino in conjuction withsomething else with 80% of my time spent using the something else.

If someone ever created Solid-Shipconstructor I'd be a happy man.

[alidesigner]

Any software will get you there, even drawing by hand will get you there. So if you have Solidworks and know how to use it then stay with that and you will get there. Other packages may get the job done faster but unless you are going to start a commercial concern then why waste your time and money on new software when you already have a tool that will do the job.

If you need to flatten hull plates then you will need rhino, delftship or maxsurf as well. Hulls are too complicated for SW sheet metal.

[chab]

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