Design Software

I'm interested in purchasing Rhino for boat design. I understand it works well for modelling hull shapes, but how is it for creating a traditional lines drawing, with offsets, and producing detail drawings?

 

Rhino is a good modeler software but not suitable at all for tradicional drawings nor for production drawings. Even for naval atchitecture calculations has many limitations. Many dedigners use Rhino just as modeler and use some other programs for developing their desings.

 

I appreciate your quick response, and comments. Very helpful. So what other software do you suggest for developing designs. I'm a retired draftsman, and used Autocad, and Microstation professionally for decades. But now that I am retired, and more a hobbyist, I cannot afford the $3000.00 price tag for full blown CAD. Suggestions please!

 

There are several programs, all very good and all quite expensive although everything depends on what you need to do and the use you want to give them.
AutoCAD, as a drawing system is very good, especially to generate the collection of drawings that accompanies any design. There are some packages that allow you to draw with AutoCAD the body lines plan, loft shapes, to carry out the calculations of naval architecture and many of the detailed construction plans, material listings, nestings for cnc cutting, etc.

 

PSmith, as a now retired Naval Architect, I have yet to run into a good program that has it all: i.e. the ability to develop shapes and the ability to produce engineering drawings. It really doesn't exist because the techniques to develop lines are significantly different from the techniques to develop 3d hull forms. It has actually gotten worse since the introduction of primitive based modeling software. There was a thread on this about 10 years ago, and it is about time to drag the questions/problems back out. FWIW, I have seen no significant progress in this regard.

 

Perhaps it is time to consider a revisit to this thread once every decade.

The use of computers in boat design https://www.boatdesign.net/threads/the-use-of-computers-in-boat-design.39263/

 

Rhino works very well for creating traditional lines from 3D surface models and should take a user with some experience no more than a few minutes. Rhino can be used to develop a set of lines without a surface model though my experience is it faster for me to develop a 3D surface model from an initial set of lines, fair the model and modify as desired or needed.

My understanding is AutoCad has more features for creating 2D drawings than Rhino but I also understand the latest version of Rhino (V6) has significantly improved 2D drawing capabilities compared to earlier versions. Whether the Rhino capabilities are sufficient depends on the requirements for the drawings. Rhino probably is not the best choice for drawings which will be used by a shipyard to build a larger vessel. But I know of several designers who use Rhino to create drawings of "small" boats.

There are several methods for creating a traditional table of offsets from a set of lines in Rhino, One is to use the Orca3D plugin. Another is to locate the points which will be represented by the offsets which is a simple task with the Contour and/or Intersect commands, export the coordinates of the points and import into a spreadsheet, and format the coordinates into a table of offsets in the spreadsheet.

PSmith - You can download and try Rhino for free for 90 days. (After 90 days Rhino keeps working but you can't save.) Give it a try.

 

I would recommend you to take a look at
Polycad (free, for the hull shape) Marcus Bole - PolyCAD http://polycad.co.uk/
DelftShip (pro, which is needed for functionality like plate development will set you back €150, but you can start off for free) DELFTship – DELFTship https://www.delftship.net/DELFTwp/delftship/
Freeship-plus-in-Lazarus markmal/freeship-plus-in-lazarus https://github.com/markmal/freeship-plus-in-lazarus
Autodesk Fusion 360 (I expect you to qualify for the hobbyist/maker license, which is free, as a pensioner) Fusion 360 for Free Personal Use | Fusion 360 | Autodesk https://www.autodesk.com/campaigns/fusion-360-for-hobbyists

 

I think the software is relative, you can also use the drafting table, the programs are tools that can produce excellent drawings and facilitate the work, but if you are aware of what you do you can use any CAD application, I know a naval architect who creates the models with Hexagon certainly not a CAD software. I am a beginner and I have had these problems for some years but I have developed a method of my own where I make everything with Blender FreeShip and PolyCAD and as a CAD tool I use Rhino only when I have to exchange models with other designers, otherwise I create my drawings all in Blender and FreeShip and PolyCAD.
Here some example of what I made in this journey with Blender. Whit that statement I don't want to convince you on use a particular software but only suggest there are a lot of way.

 

The program DesignCAD 3D is around $100 and it is a very powerful CAD program that is a huge bargain. I used it years ago when I needed to do some modeling and it did a very good job on surfacing, almost as good as programs costing 50 times as much. If you need a 3D cad program and are doing it on a hobbyists budget that is the way to go.

 

I' am very curios about that software, Because I have seen different models made with this program but I was wondering if it has the possibility of creating NURBS surfaces or works with polygons.
I this page there are a lot of awesome model made with DesignCAD 3D Max. check this here.

 

All CAD programs work pretty much the same way. You sketch in planes and extrude solids or you create sketches and then join them to create surfaces and then thicken the surfaces. All are the same but all are a bit different in how you create all the pieces. As I said Design CAD is a very inexpensive program and it will do pretty much anything a high end CAD program will do. I've used Unigraphics (now called NX), Solid Works, Inventor, Solid Edge and Design CAD 3D. All of the typical CAD programs are in the thousands of dollars and that doesn't include maintenance after the first year. You OWN Design CAD and if you don't like it you haven't lost much of anything at that price. In addition, if you don't keep your maintenance up on the big programs if you need to get a new computer they won't let you reload it to another computer without restarting maintenance. It's a huge racket. I use a big name CAD program every day and it's fine. But we pay $1,5oo per year maintenance for just one seat. We have to be compatible with the big companies so we have to do it, but if I were doing it as a hobbyist or as a startup, I'd be using Design CAD as it is a huge bargain. If you have money to burn and are doing it as a business and have the need, then a top end CAD program is a requirement, but high end CAD programs are like drugs. They want to get you hooked so you pay up every year and they are making tons of money on maintenance.

 

No annual maintenance charges for Rhino. New versions about every five to six years, and upgrade cost has been half of new license cost. Rhino uses NURBS cirves and surfaces to model arbitrary shapes as well as primatives.

 

There is also Moi3D e great NURBS modeler that help on exchanges file with others CAD, but it is lacking on the nautical and technical 2D side and it is totally compatible with the Rhino format,

I'm totally agree with you and even me I used the software you mentioned above for work in past years on many field, But many type of free form surfaces are also hardest to create in those software and some time very time consuming.And the software is only a tools that facilitate the repetitive process and for the boat that isn't very useful. Now I have my personal workflow with free open source software, but is a something that I trying to define better, and sharing every days on Facebook I hope to find the time for a simple and effective tutorials. Anyway I'm very attracted from DesignCAD 3D Max for drafting side but it not seem much different from polygon modeller. Can you share something with it, because I'm thing there are some difficult on creating some kinds of hulls like those below.

 

All boats are pretty much the same. That claim is as valid, or invalid, as a claim that all CAD programs are pretty much the same.

Some functional differences between CAD programs:

3D vs 2D - I'll assume for the rest of this discussion that the focus is on 3D software.

Geometry types used - Some software is limited to objects with simple "primitive" types of geometry such straight line segments and arcs, planes, boxes, spheres, cylinders, etc. For a lot of design work such as mechanical systems these type of objects are sufficient. Other software can have curves and surfaces with smooth arbitrary shapes, typically using NURBS or sub-division. The ability to represent smooth arbitrary shapes is usually desirable or needed for boat hull design.

Arbitrary shape representation - Three common methods for representing arbitrary shapes are meshes, Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines (NURBS) and sub-division. Meshes with simple "flat" faces are the simplest way to represent 3D arbitrary shapes but have faceted surfaces. Meshes can be quick to create and modify and may be sufficient for animation and initial design. (Computer games typically use meshes) The faceted surfaces are generally undesirable for design purposes where the CAD geometry will be used for construction. In general NURBS are better for accurately modeling surfaces and where precise control of the surface shape is important, but NURBS surfaces can be tedious to create for some complex shapes. Sub-division is a method of smoothing meshes and can be simpler for complex shapes, particularly shapes which might be described as organic, and for rapid creation of initial shapes. Precise control of the shape is more difficult with sub-division compared to NURBS.

Parametric - Some software is described as parametric. Models can be constructed such that if one element of the model is changed the other elements of the model will adjust to continue to conform to the changed element. A drawback to parametric models can be the additional time and steps needed to create the parametric connections between elements.