Software

Hello, and sorry for the stupid? question, but I am thinking of going to school for boat design, and was wondering what is the main program people use to make the boats as seen in the gallery here?

 

I think Rhino will be the winner if we sum up,
but I am not neutral

Freeship/Delftship seem to be popular also.

 

Delftship+Rhinomarine+2D CAD+Maxwell or V-Ray or Blender3D (rendering)
Prosurf+Rhinomarine+2D CAD+Maxwell or V-Ray or Blender3D (rendering)
Delfship+ViaCAD+2D CAD+Blender3D (rendering)
TouchCAD+2D CAD+Blender3D (rendering)

cheers

 

If you are wanting to a professional yacht designer, then being a good 'draftsperson' with CAD is the one skill that will make you employable in the early days of your career. You cannot start too early getting your skills up to speed.

Although it's hard to predict the future, it's likely that AutoCAD will remain the 'lingua franca' in any engineering discipline. Whatever you think of it (and most of what I think about it is unprintable), I think it will remain a key tool in most design companies and getting to grips with even the LT version would be a good grounding even if the drawings you produce aren't as 'good looking' as some of the renderings in the gallery. But it's a bread and butter skill to have, and many local colleges run evening courses in it's use, even if they are mechanical engineering orientated, it's still the same skills.

Then you need a program that can let you design the shape of the boat. Although the 'Vox Pop' survey on here shows Rhino as being the tool of choice, I was able to conduct an alternative informal survey amongst many pro designers from around Europe at the weekend, and none of them use Rhino Marine for hull design and analysis. All but one used MaxSurf and they do a 'students version' on their website for you to try. However, you will need to know a little about boat design before you can produce anything worthwhile - it's clever software but wont design a boat for you.

Rhino then does have a lot of users in the marine world for building the complete 3D surface model of the vessel and details for rendering. I was also surprised (again despite the debates on these boards), by how many offices are turning to solid modelling programs, especially those involved with composite boats, where they needed absolute precision in describing the internal structural components and fit out. It also allows for multi party collaborations on projects. By far and away the commonest tool was Catia for this, although there was no metal boat designers there at the meeting, where I know Workshop / Shipconstructor allows the same procedures for them.

Finally another 'skill' you can learn that will always help in boat design is Excel. If you don't have it them the 'Open Office' version (Opencalc) will do. There is a lot of number crunching in yacht design, and being a ' spreadsheet power user' saves a lot of time.

Computers are not the 'be all and end all' of yacht design, but they do seem to take up a lot of the day. I've never wished I knew less about the computing.

 

CGN, I am just starting to try out Maxwell Render, and I find it much better than Blender that I tried a long time ago.
How is userfriendlyness of V-Ray?

 

I agree that the DWG file format is important (AutoCAD).
I used to be an Autodesk reseller, no I push Bricscad, 90% of the features and 10% of the cost Other versions of Intellicad like Progecad have even been available for free...

 

V-Ray is great and is fast probably a little bit faster than maxwell, Maxwell is an amazing "light" simulator (excuse my poor explanation) meaning that tends to have longer rendering times but the results are top notch, if you liked Maxwell is a good render to keep.

My only problem why i do not advice about getting these plug ins for rendering is becouse for about the same cost you can get XSI foundation wich has included a v-ray engine for rendering and on top of that you get all the features like being able to add and control textures and IMO better control of your scenes and rendering results, i always mention blender as an option not only because is free (i don't like the interface), it really works fine and here on the forum are a lot of members that are new and want to get involved, so intead of buying anything they can use blender and produce real quatlity pictures for free, and in some point have more control than using rhino+plug in.

There is so many options out there and some take time and practice but i think at the end the results are sometimes really similar.

cheers

 

I use Rhino and QCad. Very simple and easy to learn.
POV-Ray is a good renderer (best free renderer around) but I rarely actually use it.
Blender is very good, but it does take a while to learn.

I wouldn't personally bother with AutoCAD. I find it difficult to use and it is rather expesive (compared to QCad).

For Hydrostatics I use Archimedes MB (free for non-commercial use). and for Powering I use a mix of spreadsheets and my own code.

 

A good combination for CAD and TouchCAD is VectorWorks.

TouchCAD can be used in combination with many rendering programs, such as Cinema4D, Cheetah3D, RenderWorks, Artlantis, etc. When exporting as DXF, you can choose to export color names as layers, which typically makes it easy to just apply the textures. When it comes to Artlantis, TouchCAD comes with a direct export feature. Artlantis is in my opinion by far the easiest to use rendering program on the market, and takes you from A to B quicker than anything else.

The picture shows 100% TouchCAD generated models. All but the bottom left images are Artlantis renderings. The bottom left image is rendered directly in TouchCAD.

 

Rendering

Hi Gang,

While we are on the topic of render engines for 3D files in nautical environments...

I am about to get my self a new render system for my marine design work. I principally use Rhino/RhinoMarine for my work. I specialize in small craft under 30 ' LOA and am pretty much tapped-out on the water render features in Flamingo. I like much of the stuff in Flamingo for object renders, etc., but it has few, diverse and flexible water surface capabilities that have a more realistic quality.

I want a piece of software that can either run inside Rhino or be fully compatible with either IGES, 3DM or any of the standard 3D file types so that I can port to the render package successfully and have a huge range of water render selections.

Please lay it out there for me. I'd like to avoid sampling each and every package to discover that there are really only two, or three, really good packages for this style of work.

Chris Ostlind

 

Maybe try this one Chris,

http://gameprog.it/hosted/typhoon/index.html

 

No such software, they all have "glitches", you best bet is V-Ray or Maxwell for rhino but be ready for serious hours of rendering, no "point and shoot" even blender can render nice water scenes, is about the user and lots of practice.

My recomendation is to get "XSI foundation" and learn the basics it will give you way better results than any rhino+render plug in, combination.

cheers

 

My first shots in Maxwell, 40 minutes and 10 minutes, but just 1 minute to set up, and light can be adjusted afterwords....

The boat belong to a customer ( I only helped with Rhino modelling),
Grovfjord Mekaniske Verksted, www.gmv.no

 

What took 40 minutes? To render? If so, at what resolution? This 100% TouchCAD generated model, consisting of 204 NURBS surfaces, took 26 seconds to render in Artlantis for Windows at 2700 x 1800 pixels, and on a 1.6 iMac running Windows XP under Paralells.

 

Claes, I am learning a new way to render
I am sure it can be done much faster, but
Maxwell is called a "light simulator", so it will always be slow compared to other methods. maybe it's not he best choice for boats, but light studies in buildings seem to be very close to reality.