SolidWorks 2007

Hi All,
I find it interesting that no one else is coming to the discussion in suport of Solidworks. (?)
I use Rhino in my yacht design business for hull design, complete structure design, hydrostatics and stability calculations. It is inexpensive, intuitive, and produces remarkable results. All for about $900 US! I do use TurboCad for final 2 dimensional drawings. That said, it would take a lot of arm twisting and some "freebies" with free software tutorial classses from someone else to get me to switch.
Michael

 

Why? Enjoying flame wars?

Seriously, each tool has it's use. If you compare the surface sculpting tools of SW to Rhino, and disregard the use of parametric updates, then of course Rhino is a better (and much cheaper) tool.

But if you're looking to complete the design, with frames, beams, stringers, plumbing, equipment, interior, cabling... and maybe making a few changes of the hull shape while you're half through that, always keeping track of hull and components weights, and in the end produce proper drawings so that a professional yard will want to talk to you about actually building the thing.... THEN you have a VERY different ballgame.

So it all depends on your point of view...

 

Please excuse my ignorance (read, not sarcasm), but why would you not want your design program to be able to do all these thing such that your design is complete to show to a builder?
-karl

 

It then depend wherether the project is a personal sailing yacht or a mega yacht. Then the investment in program will be justified. I think.

 

Jesper-
My observation, in other words, is that people who use Solidworks in yacht design are not contributing to the discussion. What I saw previously in this thread is someone (who I do not believe to be a boat designer, and you can correct me if I am wrong) hawking a product. A couple of people who seem to be well respected in the design business have questioned him and disputed the relative value of his product as it compares to Rhino in capabilities and value. Perhaps you could discuss in more detail how Solidworks would be of benefit to a small yacht design office such as mine (and most are small), how cost effective it might be and how it would make our lives better. I take it you use it? I know of a couple of large boatbuilding yards here in Maine who use Solidworks in their "inhouse" offices, but the people who are actually designing the boats for them do not. It seems some of the discussion might cover the overlap or lack thereof between the work of the Designer and Builder.
Michael

 

I see now, i wasnt reading your post in conext. I am just a ME student, my school's design courses do use solidworks however. But I am not very well versed in it to date. I was just curious, realizing how much it costs i understand now why its not very cost effective for most small firms.
-karl

 

I think many people prefer to use the software they know.
Sonadora has invested several man years in SolidWorks, so that's a tool he know very well.
I have used and programmed AutoCAD since 1987, so that's my tool for efficient drawing production.
If you are familiar with AutoCAD, then Rhino is very easy to use.
While it's not parametric, it's still easier to edit a hull with control points in Rhino than in Inventor (as I know fairly well).
I think SolidWorks is pretty much like Inventor.
If you want to go parametric, and have automated drawing creation, BOM, FEA etc, etc, then Alibre Design is a low cost alternative to SolidWorks and Inventor. (I sell Alibre so I am not neutral

One tried and tested solution that actually work for many designers and builders of medium sised boats (10 to 50 meter?) is:
1) Hull design in any program (fastShip, FreeShip, Prolines, etc, etc)
2) Export to Iges or 3DM
3) Refinement in Rhino, fairing if necesery, rendering for sales

4a) For small boats, export 2D curves to AutoCAD or BricsCad for working drawings and cnc production.
4b) For larger boats with more than 100 parts or so, import to ShipConstructor to make complete 3D solids model for weight calculation, part numberings, cut lists, assembly shop drawings, nesting, cnc preparations.

 

How very true. The bottom line of what we are talking about is productivity and efficiency, right? All tools have limitations, and changing will mean you have to learn the limitations of the new environment.

Maybe you are only doing the aesthetics part of the design, and handing off to someone else for construction. Or maybe you're only doing hydrostatics/hydrodynamics and need only a single surface for the hull shape. Those are two pretty big categories of folks around here I think.

I could try although I belive everyones context is different. I am not a professional, only a hobbyist (OK, maybe a rather enthusiastic hobbyist, and also former CAE/CAD consultant).

For example, what Raggi_Thor describes above is a perfectly workable set of tools that will cost you less than the $4000 for SW. But you have to learn 3 or 4 different programs with their respective quirks, so it comes down to how you value your time, I suppose.

Then the design process becomes important. In a heterogeneous tool environment, ECO's require more work (= time = cost). For example if the hull shape is already decided upon when you start to model the interior, the heterogeneous tools are not a big problem. But if you are in a more "concurrent engineering" environment (as I am with respect to myself, haha), where there are several changes of basic hull specs at the same time as interior design and structural analysis has already started, then the ability to have changes propagate automatically from hull shape to construction to drawings is VERY nice. Oh, and since I mentioned Structural Analysis, having it integrated in the tool for simple problems (COSMOSExpress) is also a benefit. To me it means I can do a FEA of for example a chainplate in 2 minutes to determine what dimensions or reinforcements I need for the design loads.

Be aware, though, that in SW it is not childs play to get the parametric update process right. You can easily mess up your model and it's dependencies to a point where a modification to initial data will break so many things that it's easier to start over with the model than trying to fix all the broken stuff. Again, it's a tool, but used in the right way (which I have had to discover the hard way!) you really get a much more productive environment.

The productivity increases are larger in the construction->drawings stage than in the design->construction stage. Mainly because good manufacturing documentation requires the details to be correct, which means that there will be a lot of small changes to the model towards the end. To me it is very nice to be able to spend a day making small corrections to the solid model, and at the end of the day press ONE button to update all drawings and generate PDF's from them and a new BOM (mind you the computer spends about 2 hours in this process), so the next morning the whole drawing set it in sync and up to date.

As a reference here's a SolidWorks screen of the structural parts of my current yacht project. I belive do something like this in Rhino will be quite time consuming ... (The full model has much more stuff but then you can't really see what's going on).

 

Surfaceworks

Have you heard of Surfaceworks or Multisurf?
Relational modeler for marine use, meant to augment Solidworks.

 

Back in SolidWorks 2001 or so that was great complimentary software to SolidWorks.

With SW2007, there is not much augmentation needed, and what's needed (Nurbs curve cage for bilged hulls, foil generation, hydrostatics etc) can be pretty well accomplished with FreeShip.

 

understood jesper, thanks for the explanation.
-karl

 

What is Freeship?
What do you think of Multisurf-Surfaceworks as a modeler, compared to Rhino?
Multisurf-Surfaceworks has changed dramatically since 2001. Have you had a chance to use it?

 

http://www.freeship.org/ - There is a large amount of posts about it in this forum. Very capable considering it's cost

I have in fact requested a SurfaceWorks demo recently, and tried it briefly. I'm not sure if I'm with you on the "dramatically" part, though. I'm not sufficiently versed in either to do a deep comparision to Rhino, although at a glance Rhino looks easier to use and more complete as a general purpose tool, but lacking some yacht design specials. If I was to make that choice, I would say the yacht design stuff you get with Surfaceworks is certainly not worth the price, which is much higher than Rhino's.

Surfaceworks has a VERY good integration with SolidWorks though. Rhino will get better with Rhino 4, which is now close to release, but still not as well integrated as Surfaceworks. (I haven't tried Rhino4, just read the releasenotes on their webpage, I understand geometry transfer will be well supported, but not parametric changes, which Surfaceworks support)

Also for Rhino you get support for a lot of good rendering engines and other plugins.