Orca 3D

Have just found out about Orca 3D and am considering investiong in it instead of the maxsurf suite due to the more preferable price tag. However I am uncertain of Orca's limitations as a program and how reliable its calculations are. Also I would like to know how user friendly it is?

If anyone has had any experiences using the Orca software I would greatly appreciate any advice you can give me on the subject.

 

Orca 3D runs as a plug-in to Rhino 3D www.rhino3d.com so you will need Rhino as well. You can download copies of both to try.

I use Rhino and have looked at Orca. So far I haven't purchased Orca because I didn't think I had enough use for it, but after the last couple of weeks of copying data into spreadsheets I probably will purchase it in the future.

I quickly became proficient in Rhino, and from what I've seen of Orca it is similar. The Rhino help system has been very useful and the menus easy to navigate. But "user friendly" is somewhat subjective, and depends on the user's experience and expectations.

Orca is the successor to RhinoMarine, and is developed and supported by DRS Defense Solutions, Advanced Marine Technology Center who are also a contractor to the US Navy. I expect Orca's calculations are very reliable. One difference of Rhino and Orca from some other software, including a least one other stability "plug-in" for Rhino, is that Rhino and Orca do the volume, moment, and centroid calculations for displacement, stability and other analysis directly as 3D integrals rather than as the summation of a series of 2D integrals at discrete section locations. This can improve the accuracy of the calculations.

 

It really comes down to what sort of projects you are working on. If you're anticipating working in the commercial world with all sorts of conditional stability criteria or even CE stability requirements, you will come up short with ORCA. ORCA isn't intended for that market. It is great though for the sort of thing DCockey lists above - simple and intuitive.

 

What are the shorcomings of ORCA relative to the commercial world and CE stability requirements?

 

Most flag states require stability criteria of commercial boats involving several loading conditions and then several criteria that must be met. Some loading conditions involve slack tanks where free surface must be taken into account. This is also the case with ISO 12217-1. Most full stability packages such as Hydromax, Autohydro and GHS make this sort of analysis quick and produce reports that can be submitted for approval. ORCA is not made for this sort of rigorous analyses.

Orca is very good at producing RA curves, displacement, centroids etc.. The sort of calculations that one would be doing during the design process. It is well integrated into Rhino and if you are designing hulls in Rhino it is a good fit.

 

BoatGuy is spot on. a lot of packages can do integration. It is the criteria files that is where the real time savings come in. Nobody wants to do all these criteria analyses by hand (or even spreadsheet) any more!